Elijah Burgher’s Gayhouse

GAYHOUSE is a graphic and visual journal that invites artists to share their personal, singular and affirmative vision of gay identity— whether this vision be joyful, poetic, worried, ironic, humorous, pornographic, modest… Taking over the journal is similar to inhabiting a house. The invited artist is free to select a layout, its decoration, and the guests. Ultimately, the review will present an image of his or her world.



“For the issue of GAYHOUSE, I wanted to combine colored pencil and ink drawings with photographs related to my daily life. The tensions I wanted to explore were between abstraction and representation; real and imagined; depicted and actual; whole and part; the world I yearn for and the one I move through on a daily basis. Desire is also key: the sigils are abstractions of desire, of course. The other thread of the issue is that it is very much a meditation on death, symbolized by the Aztec god of death, Mictlantecuhtlian, and an act of mourning for my friend Mark Aguhar—a young, genderqueer artist who committed suicide this past spring—who makes an appearance on the back cover. Altogether, you could say that the issue’s subject is the intertwining of desire and loss in daily life.” Elijah Burgher



Elijah Burgher (b. 1978, lives and works in Chicago) aims to contribute to the strain of countercultural queer mysticism exemplified by figures such as Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, and Hakim Bey. His works, mostly drawings, have their sources in imagination, found stories, historical artworks, but take root into the artist’s daily life and personal history. Beside figurative drawings, where men are engaged in ritual activities, he creates sigils, magical emblems conceived after an historical method of spell casting developed by early 20th century occultist Austin Osman Spare, in which the letters spelling out a wish are combined into a new symbol. Thus he creates icons that utilize the language and history of abstraction.

3 colors printing; 200 copies numbered and signed; each copy comes in a blue aluminum envelope with a b&w silkscreen sticker