Chris Scarborough is a young artist who began working with photography as an already accomplished painter and draftsman. He brings his painter’s eye to his painstakingly-manipulated photographic portraits of family and friends. Working in intricate detail, pixel by pixel, Scarborough reconstructs and distorts his subjects’ faces and bodies according to the tropes of Japanese manga or anime as an exploration of the cultural concepts and impositions of cuteness, beauty and perfection.

By translating the archetypes of Japanese cartooning style into three dimensions – affixing a set of body values read as “cute” in one setting to grounds of another – Scarborough is marking, by transgression, the thin line that separates attractiveness from malformation in our body-conscious culture. Guided by a painter’s sense of volume and proportion, he is able to maintain a measure of realism in these malformed figures. For the most part, these portraits are not monstrous; instead, the people in the photographs come off as sickly, perhaps, or in some hard-to-pinpoint other way, off-kilter somehow. The odd sense of uneasiness triggered by these photographs (combined by the literally unreadable expressions of the figures themselves, who for the most part carry postures that seem to shrug off their deformities as the most natural thing in the world), brings to sharp focus the fact that what we often see as beauty is, in reality, only a short step away from grotesquery.

Chris Scarborough is a Nashville native who received his BFA from SCAD in Savannah, GA in 2000. Exhibiting regionally since 2000, Scarborough has received reviews and been included in such surveys as ArtPapers (2005), The Red Clay Survery, 2005 (catalog), New American Paintings 2004 and 2001 (book #46, #34), Texas National, 2003 (catalog) and the Kentucky National, 2003 (catalog), among others. He has also exhibited in Chicago, IL, Charlottesville, VA, New Orleans, LA, Jacksonville, FL, and been represented at art fairs in Los Angeles and New York.