Sloan Fine Art is pleased to present Love is a Cannibal curated by
Becky Smith, owner of Bellwether, New York. Featuring works by Tyler
Coburn, Jesse Finley Reed, and David Benjamin Sherry, the exhibition
looks at the various ways these artists depict gay-male longing by
using staged, constructed and manipulated photography.
Tyler Coburn works in a range of media, including photography, video,
sculpture, and installation. For Love is a Cannibal, he will exhibit
three photographic works which combine allusions to art history,
politics, and popular culture to explore the human and artistic
tendency to dissemble identity through distortion, manipulation, and
artifice.
Jesse Finley Reed will present photographs from his If You’re Lonely√¢‚Ǩ¬¶
series, which is comprised of backlit portraits of men he met through
online communities in Berlin and New York. The anonymity of these
encounters is materialized in the intense darkness that pervades the
images, in which only the faintest outline of the sitters’ bodies is
visible.
David Benjamin Sherry uses traditional photographic techniques to
create images of desert landscapes, himself, his friends, and
constructed sets, which are imbued with sensuality, mystery, and
occult overtones. Manipulated to the edge of hallucination with
exaggerated, saturated color and geometric abstractions, Sherry’s
photographs merge autobiography with archetypal fantasy and are
infused with feelings of longing and desire for visceral experience.
Tyler Coburn holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale
University, and has exhibited with The Centre of Attention, London,
Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin, and Gavin Brown’s Passerby, New York.
His debut New York solo exhibition was held at March Gallery in Spring
2008, and his videos have screened at CRG Gallery, Whitechapel Art
Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and Ocularis,
among others. Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview and a
staff writer for Rhizome.
Jesse Finley Reed received his MFA in Photography from Yale in 2004,
and is a recipient of the Larry Kramer Initiative Grant and the DAAD
stipendium. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Arratabeer
Gallery, Berlin, and has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad,
including group exhibitions at the Hamish McKay Gallery, NZ; The
Breeder, Athens; PS 122 and Freight and Volume, New York; and Marc
Selwyn Fine Art and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles.
David Benjamin Sherry earned his MFA in Photography from Yale in 2007,
and currently has a solo show on view in Berlin at Andre Schlechtriem
Contemporary. He has also exhibited at Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna
(solo); Goff + Rosenthal, Berlin; Andrew Kreps, New York;
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Team Gallery, New York; and China Art
Objects, Los Angeles.
