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patterns of desire: overview

Patterns of Desire is a series of images based on profile photos from gay dating web sites and mobile apps like Scruff and Grindr. Frequently, in order to protect their privacy, users will post images that display only headless torsos. Artistic merit is virtually never the criterion for anyone’s choice of photo; these are self-portraits designed to arouse desire, not aesthetic appreciation.

On rare occasions, however, as I began to notice, years ago, while perusing ads for purposes unrelated to making art, someone accidentally creates an interesting image. In some cases, to my eye anyway, these may suggest art-historical references, bringing to mind Romantic figure painting, say, or fragments of classical sculpture such as Kouros figures from ancient Greece—many of which we know today only as headless torsos. 

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This body of work has its origins in appropriated profile photos, chosen for their (usually unintended) pictorial virtues. Presenting them here in a fine art context, with titles derived from the text of the original ad or profile, and arranged in grids of varying complexity, offers an implicit challenge for the viewer to look beyond the superficial titillation of subject matter to appreciate their underlying formal qualities. Somewhat paradoxically, the other side of that coin advances an argument for the frank depiction of sexuality as a valid subject for making art.

The source images are dramatically enlarged and digitally manipulated to heighten aesthetic qualities and to compensate for their low resolution. While I make no effort to remove every artifact of pixilation—some of which I find serendipitously beautiful—in some cases my process of blending out the roughest edges lends these found images an almost painterly appearance.

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In many of these images we witness the subject in the act of turning the camera on himself, whether by facing his reflection in a mirror, or capturing his likeness with a digital camera or cell phone held at arm’s length. (In some instances the device is plainly visible. In others the truncated pose hints at its presence just beyond the edge of the frame.) This act of self-regard is one of the elements I find so touching in these anonymous images, private moments captured for public display. At once obscure and revealing, they speak to me of loneliness and desire, lust and hope, the yearning for connection and the fear of rejection. They are images of human vulnerability—the one universal condition.

 

To see more images from the series click on Galleries, above.