A florid romanticism informs the photography of Beau Levine. Whether producing images in black-and-white or super-saturated colour, or depicting young men and women, still-lifes or flowers, Levine imbues his subjects with ethereal, dream-like qualities that marry the tropes of fashion photography with the edginess of Larry Clark and the fantasy of Pierre et Gilles. In his series Dead Heroes, Levine mines Greek mythology in a eye-catching and subversive take on the death glamour that underlies our culture’s obsession with youth. His portrait of Leander finds the lovelorn youth drowned and washed up on a seashell-strewn shore, while Icarus lies in a pile of feathers after flying too close to the sun and falling back to earth. Cyparrissus, meanwhile, slowly transforms into a Cyprus tree, a symbol of mourning, as he laments the death of his pet deer.

Beau Levine is a photo-based artist presently working in Toronto. He received a bachelor’s degree in Photography Studies from Ryerson University. His work is primarily informed by themes of sex, death and gender through multimedia experimentation surrounding photography, installation and collage work. He has exhibited within various venues in Toronto, including the IMA Gallery, Direct Energy Centre and the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.