Jon Feinstein
Friday, 18 September 2009
Work form Pure Aesthetics and From Russia with Love.
“Pure Aesthetics rejects the tendency to find meaning and substance from superficial visual experience. Building on Clement Greenberg’s ideas about abstract expressionism and the need for a tactile and purely visual perception of artwork, the images have little concept beyond their physical properties. Shiny, colorful, ostensibly inviting materials are laid flat and rendered into abstract patterns that at times appear to descend back into space or contain some code of visual complexity. While the “critical” viewer may demand a layered concept, there is actually nothing to explore beyond the purely physical surface.” – Jon Feinstein
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“From Russia With Love is a series of photographs culled from spam emails soliciting long and short-term romantic and sexual relationships with single Russian and Eastern European women. Writing in often-fragmented English, the women promise devotion, intimacy, and sexual companionship to lonely and unsuspecting male suitors. They embody an assortment of emotional and sexual clichés – combining illusions of idealized femininity with caricatured vulnerability. The majority of these emails wind up in spam boxes, never to be discovered. The series of photos explores an illusion of desire, and the complexities of personal interaction in the age of the internet.” – Jon Feinstein