Franko B. and my friend Tobaron have work in this show. Go check it out.

Darkrooms-Homme Made

curated by Avi Feldman

January 15 – February 21, 2009

reception: January 15, 6-8 PM 

Franko B, Amir Fattal, Carl Hopgood, Shiro Masuyama, Michal Moskop, Yochai Matos, Dean Sameshima, Kyle Trowbridge, Naama Tsabar, Tobaron Waxman

DANEYAL MAHMOOD GALLERY

511 WEST 25 ST, 3FL 

NEW YORK CITY 10001

phone: 212 675 2966

Tues.-Sat. 11am to 6pm

The exhibition explores vulnerability and means of communication in a volatile digitalized world through the prism of a darkroom. The term darkroom is most commonly associated with a workplace in which film and photographic paper are developed to make photographic prints. Nevertheless, the same term is also used to describe a darkened room, sometimes located in a nightclub, bathhouse, or sex club, (aka backroom) where sexual activity takes place. 

Darkrooms are losing their relevance in our digital times, when sex and image producing can be found and made easily through the Internet and simple and popular electronic devices. Chat rooms and digital cameras – omnipresent in mobile phones – are providing almost everyone in the western world a chance to have quick and easy sex just as it allows the possibility to make quick and easy pictures and films.

While the effects of employing digital means for sex – and for art – is yet to be fully understood, the current exhibition offers an intimate peek into the work of a young generation of artists, mostly men, giving account of themselves and their surroundings, even when it seems at first gloomy, self-centered or overly narrow. Vulnerability, obsession and sexuality are reconstructed and perceived from the hidden, voyeuristic and secluded area of a darkroom, prompting reflection and a second look at what many would consider indecent. It calls upon an investigation of the darkroom as a structure that is private and lonely while being also a space for experimentation, communication and intimacy…..

OH and in a related news item, this just in from Senegal:

Nine men were handed harsh sentences of eight years in prison after being tried on charges of conspiracy and “unnatural acts,” a term used to criminalize homosexuality, according to their lawyers and gay rights groups here on Thursday.

Read the rest in the NY TIMES.