A solo show of my recent low-resolution photographs opens today, at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, my fifth solo show there. The work is inspired by Edvard Munch’s 1893 exhibition, Study for a Series: Love. Munch exhibited six paintings that explored “the struggle between man and woman called love.” This was the genesis of a larger cycle, The Frieze of Life, a Poem about Life, Love and Death that explored the stages of life, the hopelessness of love, anxiety, infidelity, jealousy and death.
Munch’s expressive and intensely personal treatment of psychological turmoil over a century ago finds in our era an equivalent in the selfie and Facebook, where intimate moments are documented, made public, discussed and analyzed. The six photos in my series are culled from my recent online dating experiences, but printed in such low resolution as to render details and content almost unrecognizable. The closer one gets to these photos, the less one knows. I’ve included images from classic Hollywood. Even though they are stripped of detail, they still convey meaning–familiar archetypes of beauty and desirability. My intent is to draw attention to and frustrate our voyeuristic impulses. We’re invited to ponder not only what we’re looking at, but how and why.
