Mirrored figures, vivid colour and fragments of a sentence meet in They had had. Joe Mama-Nitzberg reworks an image from After Dark magazine, overlaying bodies with circles and placing joy and fear in an unsettled relationship. The text draws on Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, reversing the sequence of those emotions. Photography and language become ways of approaching queer memory, intimacy and loss, while the painted frame extends the image’s colour into the space around it. The work allows humour, desire and tenderness to coexist without settling their tensions.
Catalogue record and images from the Joseph Clark Collection. Rights in the work remain with the artist or their estate.
