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Photo installation, Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland, California, 2017.
Framed digital C-prints
Stavros at His Bath draws inspiration from 19th century paintings of women at their toilet, bathing scantily-clad by the river, or lunching in the grass naked with their clothed male companions.
During the 19th century, the representation of the nude female body underwent a revolution whose main insurgents were Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. They rejected the idealized nudes of academic painting, as well as the hypocritical confinement of the erotic to mythological subjects. Manet painted his Olympia in 1863, based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. Rather than depicting the goddess of love, Manet’s subject is a prostitute, a real woman, shocking because of her confrontational gaze and sexual independence.
The subject of my series, Stavros, is a large bearish man emerging from his tub, floating in the sea, sprawled on his bed, but rendered in such low resolution as to obliterate details of personality or identity. The images are 30” x 38” printed in a resolution of 12 x 16 pixels, each pixel about 2 inches square. I share these intimate moments in Stavros’ day, but I ask my viewers to fill in the details. I aim to frustrate our voyeuristic impulses, and sidestep comparisons with, and critiques of, this particular body. In an age of accessible images of nakedness and the ubiquity of selfies, I seek to distract us from the nude form and focus our attention instead on how we look at it. What exactly do we want to see?
Stavros at His Bath
Installation view
Digital C-prints, 30" x 38" each
Stavros at His Bath
Contrapposto, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros in His Shower, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros at His Bath, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Monemvasia, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros on His Bed (Kythira), 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros in the Sea, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros on His Bed (Skyros), 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros at His Tub, Peeing, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros on His iPhone, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros at His Bath, 2016 (partial installation view)
Digital C-prints, 30" x 38" each
Stavros at His Bath
Schinias, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Stavros at the Beach, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
l'Origine du Monde, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"
Stavros at His Bath
Sunset, Naxos, 2016
Digital C-print, 30" x 38"