"No one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them," sings Doug Martsch in a Built to Spill song. "Don't let that stop you. Tell them anyway, and you can make it up as you go."

"Arthur never tried to make art," says Eric Kroll, "Nor was he a photographer. Yet some of his photographs in Washington Square Park and Coney Island make me think of Cindy Sherman's early cinema stills, or Walker Evans in Cuba in the 1940s, or Robert Frank's The Americans." Kroll is, of course, a well-known fetish photographer and the editor of several books on the subject of erotic art and photography. He has also been a life-long collector of this material, and that's how he came to know Arthur, who contacted him in 1990, wanting to sell him vintage Betty Page photos. It took several visits to Arthur's railroad apartment in Manhattan before Kroll began to realize the full extent of Arthur's personal obsession for women's long hair (an obsession, it should be noted, that evidently never led to any type of relationship with women, physical or otherwise). In the 50s and 60s, from his position as a distant voyeur, Arthur took several thousand photographs (both b&w and color Kodachrome) and hundreds of hours of 8mm film. The subject was always the same, women with long hair. He also browsed magazine stores for comics of women in distress and movie magazines of starlets like Veronica Lake, Anita Ekberg and Pier Angeli, his favorites. From these he would cut the best parts, women with long hair, and paste them on both sides of lined and gridded paper. He did this for decades, making hundreds if not thousands of collages, several of which we are showing in Tell Them Anyway, alongside a series of 12 color transparencies he shot on the beach at Coney Island some long ago summer afternoon.

It was the physicality of his collages as objects - as records of obsession - and the cinema-like quality of the slides that made me think of work by Brandon Fernandez, Aaron McElroy (both of whom we've shown before) and Jordan Sullivan. Obsession may be the wrong word, but women play an unmistakable prominent role in each of these artists recent work. Like Arthur, aspects of the female form serve as a focus around which experimentation with medium and story telling are centered. In the case of McElroy and Sullivan, we as viewers step into the shoes of a voyeur, encountering a cast of female characters in unnamed and seemingly fabricated settings. Sullivan's assemblages, collages and photographs in his series an island in the moon coalesce in gallery installations and artist books. The pictures, printed on traditional as well as found papers (some from the very novels and records he grew up reading and listening to), are continuously reassembled and their story re-contextualized depending on how they are arranged. McElroy, too, has employed the sequencing of single images in books (most recently I Lied and previously After Wake) and large installations of 5x7 prints tacked to gallery walls to create open-ended narratives whose stories are equal to what we the readers bring to them. His framed groupings in Tell Them Anyway are singular in that they bring together prints that have been previously exhibited, shuffled around and pinned to studio walls during the editing process. The corresponding distress marks, pin holes, scratches and tears tell an additional story, that of exhibition history and working process. Fernandez's large collodion plates also bear the distinguishing marks that are singular to the collodion process, a medium he purposefully works with in order to slow down and have more deliberate interactions with his subjects. He often speaks of his work in terms of addiction, both his personal need to capture an elusive but perfect gaze and our universal human need to forever look at forms we find beautiful, but that are always just out of reach.

Books:
The Young Earth by Jordan Sullivan | Purchase >
I Lied by Aaron McElroy | Purchase >

Tiina (back), 2014
Inkjet on found paper
7 x 10 in.
Inquire >