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subscribe to style file blog via RSSsex, lives, and videotape
March 31, 2008 4:51 pm
In Jeremy Kost’s newest installation, he brings the candid sensibility of the celebrity Polaroid photography for which he’s known to the realm of video. On display at the Tribeca Grand, five large screens of handsome men in white briefs make faces for the camera. “A lot are friends, some are exes, one is a professional model,” explained Kost at the show’s opening last night. The screens face each other, and videos are sequenced so that the images interact with one another. Influenced in large part by Bruce Nauman’s “Studies for Holograms” (1970), in which the performance artist made screen-prints of himself contorting his face, with only his mouth visible, Kost chose to reference the work while updating it for a more contemporary—or, at least, underwear-clad—context. “I thought, if they can be grotesque, why can’t they be sexual? Why can’t they be something more dynamic to elicit a different response?” His interests in sex, innocence, and male vulnerability also inform his upcoming projects, including a book with Sam Shahid on the objectification of boys and a video project with Alan Cumming.
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