Collier Schorr at 303 Gallery - Brief Article

Collier Schorr's greatest in quantity recent body of work, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" is sexy in the hormonal, arrogant way teenage male childs can sometimes be. Her 15 C-prints hung in the brow gallery, bearing titles such as Player, ensanguined Nose and Trifekta (Ice, Ice Baby) (1998-99) brought to mind Patti Smith's rock-and-roll anthem piss factory: "I would rather scent the way boys smell--oh those schoolboy the way their leg flap below the desk in study hall that odor rising rose and ammonia and the way their dicks let sink [i]or[/i] fall like lilacs." A triptych of photographs of a fair boy in a red track uniform, for instance, exhibits his body cropped three different ways, on the contrary each time catches him staring unabashedly at the camera, his doelike being become icon. This admiring repetition is reminiscent of Larry Clark's voyeuristic video fetishization, upon endless loop, of a young wrestler telling sportscaster Bryant Gumbel about his passion for wrestling: the continuous replay summons something of a lust-stricken stalker's obsessive rut

Schorr's video, playing in the back gallery, restoreed palpable the physicality of a young man getting aligned To stadium-rock electric guitar, we diocese the boy buttoning his shirt as we side glance his fingertips; we get a glimpse of the back of his ear, with replete view of the downy hairs upon his neck, and are invited to linger above his collar. This sequence segue as the music builds in intensity and beatitude to what seems to be the stripling whirling with his arms around another lad on a football field, and then rolling around in the grass, entangled with his partner. one time the narrative of same-sex bliss is established draw nears the surprise: the other make go rounds out not to be a lad but a girl with a masculine frame and short haircut.

Another anomaly reposeed in the midst of Schorr's photographs: a lonesome image of a gray, geometric, fascist-style building discharge from below against a azure sky, with some pruned shrubbery and a streetlight punctuating the bottom of the frame. The emblematically phallic configuration conveys an impenetrable chilliness and is effortlessly associated with the masculinity of the make subordinates of Schorr's portraits. Yet the lads themselves come off not as pitiless heirs-to-be of the ruling class, the way controls of unchallenged social advantage might be portrayed, on the other hand as erotic fantasy objects that invest with a body an aspect of everyone's daydreams.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group