PUBLICPRIVATE 

The high visibility of the self in the 21st Century every-day, at times masked with fabrication, at others genuinely exposed, willfully sheds boundaries between what is submitted for public approval and reserved for personal reflection. On a mass scale, average citizens are compelled toward the digital strip-tease of their private selves or others – all the more comfortable with surveillance, the mass marketing of the photo op, the public defamation of rivals, the fierce cultural cling to childhood obsessions, the landscape portrait of a vacation experience, self personalization in all its forms – true or false. And during days of such exposition, what is concealed? Unspoken? Implied? How does this align with competing impulses within the artist practice? Self portraiture, windows into the intimate lives of self or others, the evolution of the ‘photo bomb’, digital spectatorship, jealous landscape photography, public confessional, criminal intent? Or does art subsist always on Wilde’s ethos of ultimately concealing the artist no matter what? Exposing only ‘beautiful things’ – concept, process, form. And then what are these pretenses at self-exposure, and where do artist’s hide, so to speak, in plain view? Under what false legacies, muddled academicisms, hall-of-mirrors conceits.