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STUDIO MEN
PHOTOS
AND PAINTED CONSTRUCTIONS
An ongoing series of photos begun in 1995, STUDIO MEN depicts models in the studio interacting with props and signs, the images touching on ideas of self-image in an age of media saturation, as well as on age, ephemerality, territory and perception. While I generate text for the signs, I also ask the models to suggest words and phrases significant to themselves. Similarly, they sometimes provide their own props in an attempt to address portraiture on a different level. As I have entered some of the images over the years, the portfolio has also become a self-portrait vis a vis the fleeting surface idealization of these men. My goal, however, has been to reach beyond whatever stereotypes we might be tempted to assign men so emblematic of today's obsession with youth and beauty (do we think of aloofness, privilege, a certain power structure?) I get to engage these "usual suspects" on a variety of levels, taking them off certain pedestals of perfection and, through portraiture and metaphor, put them back transformed. Their collaboration makes them complicit thus in our viewing of them, but their subsequent vulnerability empowers us at the same time. Can their ultimate defense be their humanity?
Combining images from the Studio Men series and my photo archive, the PHOTO CANVAS HYBRIDS employ map-like grids of B&W enlargements pasted to canvas with gesso. Painted with oils and enamels, the constructions incoporate ink drawings and collage in places, along with either hand-drawn or digitally-rendered text .
Also here is the ALFRED SERIES, 14"x11" B&W enlargements layering art-historical references in oil paint over images from the Studio Men series. This series was done while a visiting artist at Alfred University, Alfred, New York, in fall 2001.
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