Shauna Born’s All The Boys I’d Like To Fuck #1 hangs as part of the Galore series.
SHAUNA BORN at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects (1082, 1086 Queen West), to July 29. 416- 993-6610.
Born’s drawings riff on male beauty
Shauna Born’s finely wrought portraits of brooding and beautiful
young men, each about the size of a postcard, can pack a wallop. They
hang in a series called Galore (joining a larger ongoing project
entitled All The Men I’d Like To Fuck), and some of them are part of a
second show at Mulherin’s sister gallery in Manhattan.
They are,
like much contemporary drawing, summoned from some uneasy border region
between hyper-realism, classicism and kitsch. The subjects, all in their
late teens or early 20s, teeter on the cusp of manhood. All are
impossibly pretty, and their hair – flowing, back-combed or wind-tousled
– is a major dramatic concern.
It takes a while to grasp that
each face is also a composite. The pouts, strong jaws and ambivalent
stares are culled from Hollywood, Hugo Boss and Prada ads. Born mixes
and matches the features of different models and screen idols to achieve
a disorienting fantasy of male handsomeness. Each face is strongly
familiar but impossible to place.
There are hints of Taylor
Lautner in one, a strong aura of River Phoenix in another. Fans of early
Warhol films might recognize Joe Dallesandro, the hunk protagonist of
Trash and Dracula. Justin Bieber is most certainly the template for
another.
In her exquisitely detailed renderings, Born raises the
vernacular of the ball point pen to the level of fine copper engraving.
The technique points slyly to the artistic ideals of high-school
fangirls: you can imagine these portraits circulated reverently among
the faithful and taped inside locker doors.
More than that, each
image is haunted by larger themes: the fleetingness of youth, the
desire-driven engine of fashion and commerce, and our fixation on
beauty.
See the original article here.
No comments:
Post a Comment