The Aesthetic of Intimacy

The Aesthetic of Intimacy Geoffrey Aldridge Ben Gest Sarah Harrington Jen P. Harris

Jason Horowitz Ginny Huo A.B. Miner Nicholas and Sheila Pye

The Silber ART Gallery Goucher College Athenaeum

“ Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naiveté rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“ Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.”

— Robert Sternberg

In The Aesthetic of Intimacy, Geoffrey Aldridge, Ben Gest, Sarah Harrington, Jen P. Harris, Jason Horowitz, Ginny Huo, A.B. Miner, and Nicholas and Sheila Pye explore the beauty of relationships in all their multifaceted splendor. The diverse works by the nine artists in this exhibition strive to portray more than just the expression of libidinous sexual desires. Instead, they highlight all aspects of intimacy, including the social, physical, affectional, sexual, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

Disco, 2011, Video stills

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In his recent series of performance video works, Geoffrey Aldridge is interested in the connection between cultural constructions and personal decisions. Using acts of intimacy as a way to position a private context in relation to cultural ideas, his work reveals the integration between his own life and art practice. Whether referencing his American Baptist upbringing, his relationship with his partner, or ideas about masculinity, the performances are a way to reflect upon the cultural layers that inform our daily lives.

Geoffrey Aldridge

Ben Gest’s photography is a study and depiction of how human self-awareness subconsciously rises to the surface and reminds us of who we are (or who we’ve failed to become). Though sometimes fleeting, such moments of lucidity exist amid the distractions and diversions of modern life and disrupt the normal state of equilibrium that many people work hard to maintain.

Gest constructs images that feel seemingly normal on the surface, but they have subtle discontinuity. The experience of encountering the photograph parallels the picture’s depiction of a moment that lies somewhere between banality and disclosure. His work explores the internal struggle of life’s irritable frustrations and subtle anxieties.

The tension between the figures in Gest’s work, in part, results from the final image being a montage of many digital captures (between 20 to 50 photographs), which allows for a subtle exaggeration in the reconfiguration of the parts. These photographic oddities create tension for the viewer looking at the image, as do the incidences captured by the photograph.

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Jessica and Alan, 2004 Archival Print 41” x 40” Courtesey of Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago IL

Sarah Harrington has been working with embroidery since her term at the Glasgow School of Art in the fall of 2010. Her use of the medium has been influenced by women’s history and a desire to explore the traditional trappings of womanhood in a different and often-critical light. Embroidery’s history as a “women’s” activity is what drew Harrington to employ the method when she began her underwear pieces. It was the experience of encountering differing attitudes toward a young woman’s sexual agency that inspired those first pieces. The craft fit in that it both cemented the artist’s creative, and therefore greater, experience as definitively feminine, while also poking fun and questioning accepted traditions and norms.

In her underwear pieces, she embellishes “private” garments with messages that highlight the darker or less pleasant sides of some sexual encounters. The pieces brazenly speak the messages or thoughts we can be afraid or reluctant to express, from a woman’s “number” and names of her sexual partners to the cold “let’s not snuggle” of a partner who turns away immediately following sex. The play between intimacy and indifference in casual sexual encounters is what most informs these pieces.

Did it hurt, 2011 embroidery on men’s underwear

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Jen P. Harris

Mainstream popular culture has rendered certain groups and individuals invisible. Jen P. Harris’ body of work, American Kiss, takes sexual difference out of the margins and places it squarely in the center compositionally, thematically, and culturally. The project consists of polychromatic oil paintings and monochromatic works on paper. Evoking film stills, the works on paper are tightly cropped portraits of ambiguously gendered figures kissing or embracing. The images are sensual and bold, but the dark legacy of the closet also has a place in this work — in the recurring emblem of the hidden or anonymous face.

Untitled (American Kiss 12), 2009 Ink and pencil on paper 38” x 28”

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Jason Horowitz’s large-scale photographs are up-close and personal studies of intimacy. He invited couples into his studio, where they were free to shed their inhibitions and interact sexually to whatever degree they felt comfortable. The comfort levels varied widely from couple to couple, thus enabling him to capture a wide range of intimate moments.

Voyeuristic in nature, Horowitz is aware of the potential for a pornographic reading of this work. To remove it from that realm, the images were photographed with the camera lens only a few inches from the subjects’ bodies, thus limiting the viewers’ gaze by only offering a snippet of the physical interaction between each couple. Playing with the tension between attraction and repulsion, the images reveal a hyper-realistic amount of detail about the subjects and explore the relationship between representation and abstraction, thus providing enough aesthetic to offset the content.

By exploding scale, Horowitz reveals not only the fascinating terrain of the body, but he also challenges our own hidden or unspoken biases about beauty, ugliness, sexuality, and the thresholds of exhibitionism. Shot with the same “glamour” lighting used for fashion images, these photographs subvert that process, instead focusing on what is real rather than what is ideal. A glittering white sheen dramatically follows every pore, hair, taste bud, and string of saliva. The images chosen for this exhibition are erotic and titillating without being pornographic.

They capture personal and passionate moments between couples engaged in kissing, licking, sucking, and biting; they are at once sensual and playful and epitomize the aesthetic of intimacy.

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Jessika and Jeffrey, 2010 Archival pigment print 63” x 42” Courtesy of Curator’s Office, Washington, DC

Ginny Huo

Ginny Huo’s process of assimilation into an American life has greatly impacted her artwork.

Influenced by her family’s Korean stories, she is fascinated by the importance of speech and how stories are relayed mimetically from one person to another. In relation to her upbringing in contrasting Korean and American cultures, she is interested in the varying boundaries within human relationships.

Influenced by her own experiences, she speaks with other people to find out similar or contrary stories. Basic forms of communication that are used to develop interpersonal relationships become integral parts of Huo’s sculpture. Within the work, a central structure functions as a platform of interaction between the participants. This allows an opportunity to introduce the element of a barrier, accentuating nonverbal and/or verbal communication.

Come Ride with Me, 2010 two exercise bikes and wood 156” x 36” x 36”

Huo seeks to create unusual circumstances for cultural exchange and sites of metacommunication in which participants generate the work. The awkward situations that the participants face in the work create a vulnerability that connects them to one another, and perhaps it is only through this awkwardness that they find ways to assimilate.

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On small mounted boards, never bigger than 12” in any direction, A.B. Miner paints windows into his reality. His Too Close for Comfort series of self-portraits beckons viewers to move in closer, like spying through a keyhole to take an intimate look at his body and soul. With claustrophobic compositions and almost distasteful skins, the art exposes his experience.

Miner says of this work, “I once felt invisible, but those days are gone, seeming farther in my past than they truly are … in these paintings, I convey that I’m too visible.” These paintings convey the sensation of being on display like a specimen, with intimate recesses exposed.

Conjoined faces (Miner’s with that of his sister) also symbolize his life as a chimera of sorts and represent internal conflict.

They are literally “two-faced,” as a singular self-portrait would not convey the full truth of his experience and identity, which encompasses elements of traditional notions of both male and female. These abstract autobiographies document and reveal this difference and his innate duality.

As viewers approach these small and highly detailed works, the paintings return their gaze, transferring Miner’s discomfort to them in an intimate exchange. With their patchwork of unlikely color combinations forming a rocky topography of disjointed planes, the Too Close for Comfort works challenge viewers to take a hard look at life in the grey areas of a black-and-white society, and in doing so, they ask the viewer to acknowledge the grotesque qualities in all human forms, which cannot be pinned down or controlled.

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Too Close For Comfort 3, 2006 Oil and Enamel on Gessoboard 8” x 8” Courtesy of GFine Art

A Life of Errors (film still), 2006 DVD, ed. 6/12 14 minutes Courtesy of Curator’s Office, Washington, DC

Nicholas and Sheila Pye relentlessly blur the borders between their lives and their art as they tackle the highly charged yet poetic issues that arise from their own relationship and its dissolution. But theirs is not a self-absorbed biographical fascination, but instead the relationship depicted in their bodies of work becomes emblematic of all the things that can go wrong in a mutually dependent and suffocating relationship. The Pyes’ artistic output spans photography, film, performance, video, and installation while acknowledging the profound influences of surrealism in film, narrative conventions in painting, 19th- and early-20th-century portraiture, and conceptual approaches to subject matter. Given this well-versed theoretical blend, they avoid prosaic performance-art documentation, preferring to transform their photographs and films into works that cleverly reconfigure art history antecedents. No longer married, the Pyes continue to work together.

Nicholas and Sheila Pye 17

The Aesthetic of Intimacy Geoffrey Aldridge Ben Gest Sarah Harrington Jen P. Harris

Jason Horowitz Ginny Huo A.B. Miner Nicholas and Sheila Pye

March 27 – May 6, 2012 artists’ Reception

Friday, April 6, 2012, 6-9 p.m. (artist talks at 7 p.m.)

The Silber Gallery

Goucher College Athenaeum Directions

Gallery Hours

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tuesday – Sunday 410.337.6477

The Silber Gallery is free and open to the public.

www.goucher.edu/silber

12480-J1170 03/12

The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.