Detail: IR, 2010, 57 x 42 inches.

The show opens tomorrow. I'm giving a talk on Thursday October 25 and I'll be at the First Friday reception on November 2.

"...like a masterful broom, his new book had scattered the dust long settled on the subject of identity, and swept it into exciting new piles."

— Edward St. Aubyn
Some Hope

I've been reading The Patrick Melrose novels. They may sound fancy and English but they are also gritty and bleak, heartbreaking and funny. In addition to naffs, tossers, and toffs (I'm never sure what these words mean), the narrator talks about consciousness quite a bit, and this line jumped out at me they way things do when you feel they resemble something about you. This is just what my work is doing!

MH

This is a picture that will be in my show Strangers (Gallery Kayafas, Boston, October 19 to November 24, 2012). I did most of the works in 2010, but this is one from the end of the summer. It combines incompatible emotions on one face--an angry eye and a sad one, in addition to other distortions of scale, perspective, and emotion. I think of them as non-portraits, since I think these pictures are just barely connected to their sitters. The people are almost unrecognizable. But I've come to think that they are connected even though they are greatly changed. I think this line of argument is called essentialism in philosophy

This is self-portrait. I did it to go along with the rest of my Strangers series, which is one way of looking at the face. But I've been experimenting with looking at faces in other unusual ways, and mine is the most available. I thought I might show this with the Strangers, but decided not to. I want to work on it and related projects some more. I may call my next show "Me Time," by the way. I have several other takes on the subject, but I like this animated version best. Meanwhile, later on today I'm taking the prints for Strangers down to Gallery Kayafas in Boston's South End so they can install it during the week. The show opens October 19, 2012.

New Selected People Pictures

I've been feeling like doing more pictures in my Selected People series. Once the weather turned nice, I had some new ideas or the urge to finish some older ideas I never got around to. I've tried a few times in the past to do a picture of birds, but only this one lives up to what I imagined.

PRC in NYC

Here I am, explaining how big something is to my wife (r) and someone else at the opening of  PRC in NYC on May 19, 2012 in Brooklyn. (Picture courtesy the PRC Boston.)

Here I am again, at the same opening, happy to be with my wife and Glenn Ruga, who curated the show.  (Picture courtesy PRC, Boston.)

Click to go the event web site.

  

Frog Pond, Spring

I'm going to be showing work at the New York Photo Festival. Please drop by and say hello if you're in New York (see below). Some of the work is very new, including Frog Pond, Spring (above). I'm pretty excited about it. I'll be there for three days, going to shows and museums as much as possible, as well as events at the festival.

PRC in NYC
111 Front Street, Suite 210
A showcase of the vibrant photography community in New England, featuring work from the Boston-based Photographic Resource Center.
Featured Artists: Noah David Bau, Pelle Cass, Christopher Chadbourne, Dominic Chavez, Vivien Goldman, Nancy Grace Horton, Toni Pepe, Esther Pullman, William Scully, Tom Young
Reception, Saturday, May 19th, 2:30-4:30pm

Cindy Sherman Clowned

Photograph of Cindy Sherman by Martin Schoeller. I retouched it to resemble her clown pictures.

Here's the original by Martin Schoeller.

Here's another Cindy Sherman picture redone by me. Note how much my version retains of Schoeller's original.

Cindy Sherman Refurbished

Untitled #465. 2008 Photo: © 2012 Cindy Sherman/courtesy 

the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

There was a time I was sick of Cindy Sherman, but no more. I love her new work—pictures of socialites of a certain age, women who very well might be New York City East-siders and art collectors. They play off our moment’s deep engagement with appearance, and they make fun of everything in sight. Nearly sophomoric parodies on the one hand—against all odds—they are deeply moving on the other. These women desperately want to look the way they used to—younger, firmer, better dressed, prettier, more fashionable. (They probably look as wealthy as ever.) But they can’t pull it off. They look ghastly. Though Sherman plays these characters, she says they are not about her, that they are not self-portraits. Yet these women are relatively close to her in class, status, and wealth. Sherman’s formal dexterity with makeup, wigs, prostheses, sets and backgrounds, props—all the artifice of Hollywood and Madison Avenue—is stunning and, just by itself, a feat. She is so crafty that she almost parodies parody itself. Sherman both mocks Hollywood slickness, by going broad and obvious, much like theatrical makeup, and she also mocks the society lady's desperately clueless efforts to slap on the spackle and turn back time. And the new work, with what seems to be occasionally increased empathy for its subjects, somehow makes all her other work look great, too. It's a miracle that I’ve been puzzling over. I have no answer.

Untitled #465. 2008 Photo: © 2012 Cindy Sherman/courtesy 

the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. 

Retouching courtesy, if that's the word for it, me.

As an exercise trying to understand, I retouched my favorite Sherman picture. I simply removed everything that was “wrong” or “unsightly” and "improved" the overall tone--what a fashion retoucher might do.  Here’s an itemized list. Top to bottom, I

• raised the hairline and removed the widow’s peak
• added light to the eyes and removed the red from the eye rims
• smoothed the wrinkles around the cheek and rest of face and removed makeup, esp. blush
• desharpened the nose
• fixed the lip line (was bigger than mouth) and removed the cracks in the lips
• softened the chin line and took out the neck wrinkles
• fixed the anatomy of front shoulder and softened the shoulder blades. Also removed the sunburn from the shoulders
• softened the general tone of the image to look a more harmonious, somber, and old master-y and corrected the perspective of the background

This way, it's easy to compare.

From xazor.com

 I've always included a little forced perspective in my work. That's the common photo hobbyist's trick of mixing near and far and letting the camera flatten out the image. The result is usually a joke about scale, as above. But photographers and artists have used it in other ways, as below.

John Pfahl

Esther Stocker

George Rousse

Pelle Cass (me!)

And here's a recent image of mine that I did at a recent residency. One of the notable features of the examples above, excepting the snapshot of the helicopter, is the tidiness and precision of the images. I wanted to do something shaggier, I guess. Something where you can see how it's done and see some mistakes, but the trick still works. I've also inverted a couple of other things: the margins contain my alterations, and I've used 3-D materials to make them. Click images to enlarge.

I Was My Only Option

I was at an artist's residency (Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs) in January, and started a whole new thing. I started doing self-portraits, something swore I'd never do. I hold the whole genre in contempt. All those imitation Cindy Shermans. Irritating, self-absorbed artists like Laurel Nakadate and on and on. Well, it's official. Now I like them all, for the most important, compelling of all reasons: I'm doing self-portraits myself! It's fun! Now I can practice sucking my stomach in! Holding my shoulders back! Oh, the vanity! There was nobody else to use as a model at the residency, which strictly enforces "quiet hours," during which you can't approach another resident to beg them to come pose for a minute. Besides, they are all pretty busy with there own work. I was my only option!

Note: I haven't really been blogging much for the past year or so. My plan is write a lot more in the coming months. In that spirit, I redesigned and renamed the blog more in accord with my new vanity. Goodbye, Brand New Unfinished Projects. Hello, Pelle Cass, the blog. (I thought about naming it Mr. Pelacus, which I have been called occasionally when people read my first and last name as one. I've also been called Pearl Katz, Pelé, and many other minor variants. My favorite is, although it wasn't at the time during middle school, "Dictionary." In any case, I was more often called "Poindexter" for my manly glasses and bold, decisive mien.)