Diego Gabaldon

Diego Gabaldon is an artist and designer from Miami, FL. Influenced by the sporting culture of body-
building and combat sports. Gabaldon focuses on the intersections between the psychology of competition, hypermasculinity and the obsession for physical transformation. Especially in mass media culture, where a fast-pace of images and trends permeates the psyche, these psychologies of competition and hypermasculinity are inseparable from notions of desire – and in this way, the media anchors itself as the leading definer of
masculine identity.

Acknowledging this symptom in media culture and the notion of athletics as the most visceral, carnal, exertion of desire, Gabaldon borrows the format of organized sports and athletic regimen to create complex, psychologically charged worlds that refuses the short wire of unattainable physical desires as informed through the media and instead asks to look at the desire head-on, where ideas of biology, sexuality, and desire are cross-wired and constructed, arbitrarily defined and ultimately pitted against itself.

Against this backdrop, Gabaldon constructs sporting life and sport world-building, faux campaigns and imitation branding that satirizes the systemic triggers in masculinity and yet at the same time, reveals the psyche of the masculine in both its corporeal and empathetic form.