Gloria!

Gloria! runs November 21- December 5 at The Project Lodge, 817 E. Johnson, Madison, WI, and is for adult audiences only. Reception is 6-9 on December 4.

Paul Baker Prindle deepens his focus on indexical portraiture in Gloria! an installation of large-scale color photographs and 3-D objects at The Project Lodge. The Brooklyn based artist and current University of Wisconsin MFA candidate takes a look at the culture of men who meet men for public sex. 

Photographed and collected at sites throughout Madison, Milwaukee, and Eau Claire, Wisconsin as well as New York City, London, Minneapolis and eastern Washington, Gloria! includes photos of discarded condoms, glory holes, and graffiti advertising for sex. Alongside these photos hang collected objects including wrappers, condoms, bottled semen, and lubricant packets.

The encounters between viewers and the visual material presented in Gloria! enliven the gallery space and complete the efforts of Baker Prindle to underline the ties between viewer and viewed. The absence of bodies and the incorporation of traces, remains, fluids, and vestments trouble the conventions of photographs and emphasize the role of the viewer in the practice of portrait making.  These traces and remains provoke powerful narratives that reveal much about how we understand what is strange to us.

In Gloria! the mix of abject and the sublime moves toward what Norman Bryson, critic of the Boston School artists, has called the “re-humanization of the ways the body has come to be represented by the camera.”   The images in this installation offer a disquieting view of how bodily the body is as well as how strongly we associate the body with identity.

fStop.

Group show. 7th Floor Gallery. Mosse Humanities Building, Madison, WI.

4/17/2008 - 4/25/2008

Sterling Hall, First Floor
427 N. Charter Street, Madison, WI 53706
12:00 p.m.- 4:00 p.m. or by appointment
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 17, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Paul Baker Prindle’s MA Exhibition Proscenium, focuses on theatre as a metaphor for considering the roles individuals play as they present themselves to a world of actors and viewers. Proscenium challenges the viewer to consider the (im)possibilities of (re)presenting authentic identities and specifically how the conventions of art, art-making, modeling, and viewing mediate reception of images of humans and the spaces they use. Taking cues from the theatrical conventions of The Baroque, the artist offers a view of Queer identities that gives his subjects a sense of import and also calls attention to the conventions people use to perform identities. From the clothes one wears, how one carries one’s body, with whom one acts, and in what spaces one does what ones does, these practices and locations all act as frames that distinguish individuals both as unique and as part of communities.

proscenium, noun. In a modern theatre: the front part of the stage; spec. the area in front of the curtain, often including the curtain itself and the arch of framework which holds is.

1860 All Year Round No. 44. 417
"The appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium… is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness."

Univeristy of Wisconsin Art Department Calendar

paulprindle@yahoo.com