JosephSbarro

This body of work is essentially about the dichotomy between beauty and repulsion, Eros and Thanatos,  light and dark. All of these concepts are nothing without their counterparts. One cannot exist independent of the other. You only know light if you have experienced the dark. Both intertwined in the human psyche. Like a double helix, inseparable. As interesting and thought provoking as these concepts may be on their own, when you have them both together, unified in one image, it creates an incredible tension and they resonate together. 
    Using abstractions of the nude male form to merge these concepts I create a body of work that is mysterious, beautiful, and unnerving. I want people to be drawn to the work because of it's highly classic aesthetic qualities, but then made uneasy or slightly perturbed because of the unfamiliar nature of the manipulated human forms. The human body is one of the most universally familiar and recognizable entities to us as people. And using my photographs I want to exploit this by taking the concept of the body, something so intimate and relatable (for what are we all but a body? It is one of the only things that all people everywhere have in common) and transforming it into something foreign, something other, something vaguely unnatural. And in doing so rendering the viewer aware that what they are looking at is a body, but unsure of how.