Social Distancing
Singles | Social Distancing
Doubles | Social Distancing
Trebles | Social Distancing
Quartet | Social Distancing
Walking Walking Walking…
Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Meeting Strangers Talking Taking Photo Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Meeting Strangers Talking Taking Photo Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Meeting Strangers Talking Taking Photo Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Walking Home | 16:04:20 - 29:05:20 | 5 Miles
Jay in Mundane | Space
Jay in Mundane | Space: Portraits of Jamal from a few years back, quite a few years ago looking at that ancient Samsung Z400 slider phone (he was texting constantly), a pair of battered Nike Air Max Tn’s and a JD Sports bag from the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I remember that look.
Control: Gone are the days when you could walk in to a Burger King, KFC or McDonalds and the manager would happily allow a photoshoot in the restaurant. We did all three. Jamal looks like he’s in another place. He was half listening, one earbud out, to The Streets third album ‘The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living’ on the iPod. He fell asleep in the car on the way back to Crawley.
2020: So much has changed, our relationship with technology, obsession with creating, sharing, controlling images of ourselves and others. I’d like to restart the portraiture, pickup where I left off following themes of the domestic and mundane / dressing for pleasure / identity / fantasy / obsession / repetition / voyeurism / the absolute and total surface appearance of things / thresholds of abstraction…quite a handful then, always playful. Outputs: to be determined. Would anyone like to COLLABORATE / EXPLORE / MODEL?
Trainers | Textures | Radical Books | Brighton
New trainer store on Trafalgar Street in the North Laines Brighton. Well, old trainers actually all beautifully displayed and arranged according to size on a wire mesh shelving system throughout the store. Excellent.
NCP facade Brighton
Cowley Club bookshop window Brighton
Masculinities | Barbican London
MASCULINITIES: Inspiring new show on at the Barbican. So many ideas and critical perspectives to take in on one visit. It’s great to see a show that gives you so much to think about and a sense that a lot of it has slipped in there below the radar. Some of the portraiture is exceptional, subversive, playful, layered, transgressive.
Athleticism is often perceived as a proxy for strength, which is itself equated to masculinity, thus constructing the deceptive notion that strength and social power rely on how masculine one is. In Catherine Opie’s (b.1961, USA) series High School Football — comprised of formal portraits in which young players gaze directly at the lens — her subjects reveal a vulnerable youthfulness that stands in direct contrast to the stereotypes of masculine virility associated with American football culture and the perception of athletes as aggressive, hypercompetitive and emotionally disconnected. Photographed between 2007 and 2009 in locations across the US, from Hawaii and Alaska to Texas and the artist’s home town of Los Angeles, High School Football foregrounds the vulnerability of young male athletes in the precarious moment between youth and adulthood.
Israeli artist Adi Nes’s (b. 1966; Israel) evocative colour photographs often recall scenes from art history while also exploring homoeroticism. In his meticulously staged series Soldiers, for which he photographed young men performing as infantry soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces, Nes makes clear the connection between culturally dominant masculinity and the masculinity of the Jewish combat soldier, a figure perceived in Israeli culture as an emblem of good citizenship. His cinematic images of soldiers sleeping, resting, smoking and generally larking around are all grounded in his own experiences as a gay Mizrahi Jewish man. Nes not only infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers. As well as inscribing the queer body into the military imagination, Nes also cast a young man with an amputated arm to pose in one of the images in the series, further breaking down the narrow confines of military-sanctioned masculinity.
Exploding with psychosexual drama and tension, Polish-born, New York-based artist Aneta Bartos’s performative series Family Portrait. 2015-18, alludes to the way portraiture is often a process of artifice and construction. What began as the intention to document her father, a retired bodybuilder, before his body started ageing, quickly turned into a collaborative project: Bartos brings herself into the frame to usher In a disquieting and challenging variant on the father—daughter dynamic, one seemingly untethered from societal expectations. In Apple for instance, Bartos’s father holds an apple while Bartos stares directly to the camera and by extension at the viewer, calling into question the biblical narrative of the fall of man.
Eroded Calligraphy | London Road Brighton
Reminiscent of the layered, eroded, abstract stencilled typography of Jasper Johns Alphabet works.
Shard | 20 Years of Decay | 1 Year of Observation
The shard collapsed or was pushed over in the Summer of 2019.
Warden Point | 80x80cm C-Type Print
Edition of 5 numbered framed prints. From a visit in February 2019.
Driving At Night / Fragments / Moments | In Development 2020
4K Video ©Andrew Durham 2020.
Greatstone Beach | New Romney | Kent | UK
Down a little path inbetween some houses over the dunes and on to the beach. From a visit in July 2019.