Video Head Reliquary
works by Bearpad

The artist duo BEARPAD (Patrick Stephenson and Jordan Fickel) is a coupla scruffy bubs based in San Francisco, California, focusing on making big fun colorful art for the queer community and beyond. Starting out over a decade ago with illustration and graphic design work, BEARPAD is now known for their large scale figurative wooden cutouts, inflatables, and t-shirt designs that celebrate larger bodies. Their work has been seen at queer events across the country, installed in solo and group exhibitions, and large scale public murals around the San Francisco Bay Area. Utilizing a style that is vibrant, uncluttered, and direct to represent the LGBTQ+ community, BEARPAD presents a body positive and inclusive vision for radical intimacy and affection across mediums.

Exhibition Checklist

Video Head Reliquary

Video Head Reliquary
Artists Statement

This work explores the intersection of queer embodiment, criminalized pleasure, and the politics of memory through the medium of plaster casting. At its core is a stylized cast of a chubby, seated nude male figure —a radical celebration of body diversity in defiance of dominant archetypal norms, particularly within gay culture. The figure becomes both subject and vessel: encased within the plaster is a sealed vial of Double Scorpio amyl nitrate, a brand of poppers recently rendered clandestine after a federal raid of their operations in early 2025.

Plaster casting, with its classical lineage and historical use in death masks and anatomical preservation, here serves a dual purpose—as both monument and memento mori. By suspending poppers within this medium, the work literalizes the tension between visibility and erasure, containment and liberation. The encasement becomes a reliquary: a sacred container holding not just an object, but the residue of queer ecstasy, nightlife, intimacy, and rebellion.

The inclusion of Double Scorpio is personal, based on a long standing collaborative relationship with the brand before its recent closure, a partnership rooted in shared values of queer creativity, sex-positivity, and experimentation. Their artisanal approach to amyl nitrate—fragrant blends in apothecary bottles—elevated poppers to the level of queer ritual artifact. Their disappearance, hastened by new political pressures, felt like the closing of a cultural chapter. In referencing them, we preserve not only a material product but the ethos and community they embodied.

This piece also draws on broader histories of queer regulation and coded expression. From cruising to concealment, queer pleasure has long existed under threat, often hidden in plain sight. As noted in the New York Times article “Is The Poppers Party Over?”, amyl nitrates have occupied a unique, liminal space in queer life: visible yet stigmatized, ubiquitous yet criminalized. By embedding them in sculpture, we aim to ask—what do we preserve, and what do we lose, when queer culture is forced underground once again?

Ultimately, Video Head Reliquary is an act of archiving. It resists forgetting. It enshrines outlawed desire, insisting on the dignity and worth of all queer bodies—pleasured, heavy, and whole.