Nitelife

Staged scenes of sublime, late night revelry exploring the intersections of temporal experience and archival permanence.

Nitelife is a series of photographed dioramas depicting imagined and recreated scenes of late night revelry: bars, clubs, dancing, underground escapism. The dioramas are constructed from paper and articulated googly eyes, lit with led party lights and photographed on Ektar 100 iso 4x5 film.

On a recent trip to Italy I became fascinated by the reliefs of Roman sarcophagi depicting scenes of divine festivity between gods and mortal men. On these tombs artists carved moments to ecstasy, wrapping the deceased in the Dionysian as final testament and communication for some future onlooker. Later in some underground discotech witnessing the bacchanals of the 21st century, I thought of the metaphysical act of dance and its transcendent, escapist aspirations. I also thought of our own 21st century artifacts of digital photographic archives, ethereal yet just as seemingly permanent as carved marble.  I thought of social media and its bias towards the good times, of friends I had lost, their profile's trapped in amber, monuments of smiles and celebrations. I thought of the dark magic of photography's implied immortality, the preservation of time to combat the passage of time. What was this millennia-old craving to be immortalized in ecstasy, to have jubilance rendered material? A good night that lasts forever? A loss of control in the hope for the sublime?

Drawing from queer archives, social media, painting and classical sculpture and relief, this work probes photography’s role of rendering experience unto objects as portals. The work wrestles with photography's assumption of permanence and reality by questioning how the subject matter was made, assembled and choreographed. Examining archives of party photography stretching back to the 1970's, I contemplated the idea of the image's afterlife, the act of creation and the endurance or malleability of the photographic object depending on its context. With “Nitelife” I seek not only to elevate our archives and heritage, but to bring these worlds back to life.