PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Chris Scarborough
July 13 - August 19, 2006
Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, July 13, 6 to 9 pm
Castleberry Art Stroll: Friday, July 14, 7 to 10 pm
Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce a one-man
exhibition of photographs by emerging artist Chris Scarborough.
The July exhibition is concurrent with the Atlanta Gallery Association’s
“Introductions06” summer programming that focuses on
showcasing exciting young talent.
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 this body of 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. Eyes and heads sometimes grossly
enlarged and swelled rest on thinned, elongated necks and disproportionately-shrunken
shoulders and torsos. Scarborough’s method is maintained by
a remarkable subtlety, however. 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. By grounding his subjects’ distortions in the realm
of reality, Scarborough does not allow the viewer to retreat into
the solace of fantasy. Rather, 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 in our body conscious
culture from malformation. 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.
Scarborough is a Nashville native who received
his BFA from SCAD in Savannah, GA in 2000. This is his first exhibition
at Marcia Wood Gallery and his first solo exhibition in Atlanta.
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.
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