JON RAFMAN + MARK SOO
Mark Soo’s Koons on Ice features a computer-modelled version of Jeff Koons’ pornographic Made in Heaven sculpture, with the glass-like bodies acting as an optical lens that refracts a public scene through the sculpture. The result is a speculation, at once factual yet hyperreal. The imagery of the transparent body in space is also a visual metaphor to mean the digital world. Soo’s photograms, You can see the weakness of a man right through his iris, are further explorations of shapes, bodies, and optics and bring to mind the instinctive relationship that connects eye to phallus, phallus to lens, and lens as a fundament to the act of vision and photography.
In Mainsqueeze, Jon Rafman surveys and videocollages clips from the darker corners of the Internet to explore obscure shocking subcultures. Koons claims that Made In Heaven was spurred by seeing the portrayals of Adam and Eve being cast out of paradise in the frescoes of Brancacci Chapel in Florence, and that the work is “after the fall, after guilt and shame is removed.” Similarly, Rafman’s dark web videos investigate subjects whose guilt and shame are non-existent. Their self-acceptance and shamelessness is indicative of our contemporary condition.
Mature content warning, viewer discretion is advised.
