Love Is a Cannibal at Sloan Fine Art

Raising the internet hookup to an art form, Jesse Finley Reed photographs men he meets from online communities in Berlin and New York. His striking, backlit, jumbo portraits (40" x 50") are part of a three man show curated by Becky Smith (Bellwether) opening tonight at Sloan Fine Art on Rivington. Jesse graduated from Tufts in 1998 and earned his MFA in photography from Yale in 2004. He has had solo or group shows in Athens, Berlin, New Zealand, Los Angeles, and New York. His artist statement discusses the "disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject:"

nightclubs are brightly light, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models.

There is an implication of queerness that plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation.

The other two artists are Tyler Coburn and David Benjamin Sherry. Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview and his photography has been included in group shows in London, Berlin, and New York. Sherry earned his MFA last year and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Vienna. Love Is a Cannibal "looks at the variety of ways these artists depict gay-male longing by using staged, constructed and manipulated photography." Tonight's reception is from 7:00 to 9:00; the show runs through September 13.