EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Do It for the Boys follows the Los Angeles Rebellion – one of the United States’ four original Queer/Inclusive rugby teams. A member of the team for 6 years, I began to document my friends and teammates during this increasingly uncertain time after a dislocated leg caused me to retire permanently from playing.

As they returned to the field for their 20th season amid increasingly violent anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric sweeping across the country, I found the Rebellion as stalwart, passionate and determined as ever. With a 6×7 camera and a tripod (my hands being occupied by crutches) I began to work fervently – hoping to capture even a portion of the energy, community, and of course sexuality, that defines the team and its members.

“It’s intoxicating isn’t it?” My teammate Ben said to me at a bar after a game, “Being out in public.” This was a place where they were their true selves, on and off the pitch.

Not just a team but a chosen family – ready to bleed for one another if that’s what it takes.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Few things in the world, and fewer things still in America, exist without the ensnarement of capital. Club rugby is one of them. Three times a week, the Rebellion gathers to slam into each other and their opponents—with only cold beer, cheap pizza and bruises waiting on the other side. Games are played underneath overpasses and alongside highway exits to Seaworld, at a high school in the High Desert or a neighborhood park in Temecula (there the ground is mercifully soft, sod applied over soil, not dirt on top of concrete landfill). Nothing is expected and nothing is given except competition and hopefully friendship.

At its core this work is a celebration of the Amateur and the Queer – those who apply themselves to their passions and communities without concern for reward. Without them we would not have the things that make life worth living, the people who love and support us regardless of who we are, and the spaces that have been fought and paid for with the lives of those that have come before us. Because when we finally learn to separate ourselves from archaic forms of valuation and identification, that is when we are truly free to be exactly who and what we want – like, for instance, a Gay Rugby Team.

ARTIST BIO

Nathan Bolton is a photographer from Boston, MA. His current work focuses on the act of generating and sharing joy in the face of looming environmental collapse, and examining the experience of growing up, living in and returning to, an origin point of the American National Myth and Empire.