Emma Bee Bernstein "Exquisite Fucking Boredom"
Microscope Gallery
This event has ended.
With intimate as well as often staged photographs of the artist and her close friends, Bernstein – who committed suicide in Venice, Italy at the age of 23 – transforms the spontaneous, on-the-spot Polaroid aesthetic into a generational portrait of hyper-self-conscious, passionately alluring young women and men taking on adulthood with deadly serious abandon. The roughly 200 photographs in Exquisite Fucking Boredom were taken during Bernstein’s college years, 2003 to 2007 and have never before been seen. The photographs have been assembled from Bernstein’s personal archive and private diary notebooks by curator Phong Bui in collaboration with her parents artist Susan Bee and poet Charles Bernstein and will also be on view.
Bernstein who earned a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from the University of Chicago writes, “The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration of the photographic performance.” Bernstein is indebted to the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Francesca Woodman, and Cindy Sherman. Her works are marked by an acute awareness of the fleeting and temporary nature of existence. The Polaroid series are just one of several bodies of photographic works by the artist who also worked with 35mm film and digital formats.
Media
Schedule
from May 24, 2012 to July 02, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-05-24 from 18:00 to 21:00