Evan Schwartz Birthday Party 2004 digital C-Print 30" x 24"
Evan Schwartz Waiting by the Phone 2004 digital C-Print 30" x 24"
Evan Schwartz has his first solo gallery show and it dazzles, with both the bold inventions of his art and the infectious joy (and sad frustrations) of a second puberty - this time the one he really wanted.
The Schroeder Romero press release explains:
Evan Schwartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1982 under a different name and gender. His new photography series Reclaiming Puberty, is a maturing timeline about growing up as a girl into a man. Through this self-exploration of gender and sexuality, Schwartz painfully discovers that in order to become the man he's always wanted to be, he must go through the perils of adolescent boyhood first - after already experiencing adolescence as a girl.The gallery installation follows chronologically her childhood and youth, documented in family photos, through a self-documentation of the courageous transformation process which permitted him the ordinary joys and frustrations recorded in the last images in the show, two of which are shown above.
Schwartz is currently a student of photography at Pratt Institute. I'm sure we will be seeing a lot more of his work, whatever form it may take.
Michael Waugh Inaugural 2004 ink on mylar 36" x 78.5" detail
In the Project Gallery space Michael Waugh has installed a number of his text-drawn and text-painted works in [dis]honor of the frightening annointing process the nation will witness tomorrow on the capital steps. Waugh's images allude to homosexual desire and identity. They are immediately and profoundly beautiful, as they always are in his work, but their relationship to the historical phrases of which they are mostly composed is profoundly disturbing, especially in the reality of the perverted politics of today.
[images at the very top from Evan Schwartz]