ON MASS EXPERIENCE, 1998 - 1999

This body of work is a meditation on the seductive power of mass experience. The project looks at the individual who is swept along within an ideologically charged environment, and addresses the legacy of responsibility, guilt, and denial of Nazi Germany.

Photographs taken from archive images of crowds performing the Hitler salute are juxtaposed in identical diptychs and then altered with oil paint. Faces hidden from the camera by the raised arms are reinvented, erasing the hands and arms in the process. This can be read as a metaphorical effort to break the web which unifies masses, to make the individual stand alone again, rendering the group’s seductive power impotent. In the ‘reverse’ versions, all visual information except for the raised arms and hands are blacked out with paint. Here the unified gesture depicts the directed energy palpable within large groups.

All images oil paint on C-prints.

2000
Stefan Stux Gallery ( project room), New York, NY

1999
A Show of Hands, Stefan Stux Gallery, New York, NY