Amy Adler art show
UNLV's Donna Beam Gallery currently has an exhibition by Amy Adler entitled Centerfold, which features five large-scale self-portraits in centerfold-style poses. This review describes Adler's novel technique. (Dead link removed. Apparently Las Vegas CityLife doesn't keep arts articles online after the next week's issue comes out.)
It would have been easy, and terribly obvious, to simply set up the visual world of the centerfold and shoot it with the artist as stand-in, a la Cindy Sherman (such a project would likely be dismissed as derivative of Sherman and numerous other photographers who theatrically reinvent themselves in their lenses). But what Adler has done is to take her self-portraits, then create intricate, detailed chalk-drawings based on them and rephotograph those drawings, producing a glossy cibachrome print that is rendered unique by destroying both the original photographs and the drawing. This way, Adler has it both ways: the end result is clearly an art object, the skilled cross-hatching on Adler's skin proclaiming itself as the work of a hand, while the surface and color has the feel of a magazine photo spread, a mass-media image.
