The doors were shut and all the TVs were off and I thought, well dammit. Then I took some exceedingly grainy camera phone pictures of the Sangiamo show and decided I’d talk about that instead — I figured I could draw some sort of emac-type connections.
What interested me most were the portraits — Sangiamo had said he’d wanted to make one of every student. I haven’t decided if I think he ever meant that literally, but it doesn’t really matter — the collection of portraits in Fox is a very intimate cross-section of MICA. They feel almost like an anthropological study, as they are not labeled with names, but rather with class years or jobs or distinguishing physical traits. In terms of compositions, they are almost like mug-shots, painfully simple busts on either blank or solid backgrounds. This creates a very graphic, almost digital-art feel, which makes for a nice juxtaposition with the very gritty and painterly coloring and rendering of the figures. The portraits that have tattoos and accessories worked into them later also have this graphic quality to them, at times feeling almost as though colorized or layered on top of with Photoshop, furthering the tension between a clean and modern feeling and an iconic, gritty and tangible feeling. I could stare at these for hours, they are so beautiful and feel so honest.
