EXHIBITION DETAILS

Strength and Vulnerability | Zoe Zimmerman

Solo Exhibition November 6-28, 2015

Artist Talk 5:00 pm November 6th

Public and Artist Reception 6:00-9:00 pm November 6th

STATEMENT

In a series of elegant black and white portraits, Zoe Zimmerman constructs images of men in close contact, cradling and carrying each other in ways that might suggest intimacy. Yet their bodies strain in opposite directions, repelling each other like magnets. Their gaze is averted, off-center, as if avoiding direct confrontation. In the first grouping the men appear emblematic and timeless in crisply pleated slacks and mildly wrinkled shirt-sleeves, all details heightened. Men dressed as men lend the image a theatricality, further emphasized by the black backdrop. By replicating a 1930s Red Cross First Aid manual instructing men on the proper forms of rescue operations, their poses suggest myths of heroic masculinity capable of neutralizing anxieties about male touch. Or not. In the very way they curl their fingers, avoiding full contact with another man’s leg, the palpable tension points both to the limits of containing such anxieties and the extent to which heroics are always sexualized. If it were possible to touch without touching, these portraits would show us how. The men are there and not quite there. A stoic emptiness in their expressions imbues the images with a haunting, ghostly quality, inadvertently marking a site of disturbance, like a sense memory from which one recoils..... This, then, is Zimmerman’s project: a study of the contortions wrought by homophobia and a lament about the dearth of touch in the lives of boys and men. _Zoe Zimmerman