Gloria!

Gloria! includes photos of discarded condoms, glory holes, secluded meeting sites, wayside restrooms, and graffiti advertising for sex.  The absence of bodies and the incorporation of traces, remains, fluids, and vestments trouble the conventions of photographic portraiture 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.