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Ivar Wigan
Lux Interior
2011

Name: Lux Interior
Brand: Ivar Wigan
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

$2,054.09List Price

About the Item

Contemporary photograph by Scottish photographer Ivar Wigan. From the series “The Gods,” 2011 Pigment print on Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag 310 Edition of five (5) + 2AP’s. AP2 Exists in a foundation of work built for future retrospectives of the artist’s work and will not be made available. Prints are sold unframed and include black boarder. Sizes available: 25.5 x 17.75 in. (65 x 45 cm) 33 x 24.75 in (84 x 63 cm) * Sizes may vary +/- 2 cm based on artist crop. Oculus Gallery presents ‘The Gods’, Ivar Wigan’s series of reportage photographs, he celebrates his companions’ defiant creativity in impoverished African- American communities living on the urban fringes of the Southern United States. Eighteen images present vivid beauty, glamour and camaraderie under conditions of significant stress, deprivation and frustration. Wigan is not providing new insight into America’s grave imbalances in privilege and opportunity. What he does is something more unique and interesting. He presents peoples’ strategies for crafting and asserting identities that transcend their cultural context. Wigan’s work is art, not journalism. Like Dash Snow, Patrick O’Dell, Jamie-James Medina and Ryan McGinley at his start, Wigan photographs the human side of a counter- culture. As Wigan explains, “If you have no job opportunities, no travel opportunities and live in constant, low-level, danger you see life in a different way. You make the most of what little you have. You become creative.” Wigan does not explore the social or political pressures that impel his subjects’ intense aesthetics and life-styles. Instead, he honors them by showcasing their gritty glamour. A central part of this series, shot over the course of four years, is the strip club culture of the American South. As Wigan perceived, strip clubs in the American South are not places of anti-social alienation but social hubs where married couples, and men or women alone or in groups, gather to drink, play pool, dance and socialize. The strippers working at the apex of this underworld can command thousands of dollars in a night. Wigan reports seeing bin-liners brought to tables to bag up their earnings after a session of songs. In the club, Wigan’s camera was one attentive, engaged observer among all the others. The women’s awareness of their beauty and its power, even in the case of an overweight fetish dancer, gives Wigan’s work its seductive charm. For those reasons, viewing his images of naked strippers does not feel exploitative, but rather responsive to their commitment and excellence at what they do and are. The portraits that he took reflect the dancers’ attention to their appearances and complex interrelationships between the strippers. For Red Light (2011), Wigan photographed Paradise, Shanelius and Cream at work in an Atlanta strip club. Paradise, a pretty, young and ambitious dancer, preens between her friend Shanelius’s legs. Shanelius is distracted from Paradise and the camera by Cream, her rival, who clumsily practices on the pole. Despite their physical closeness, each of the women is secluded in her private drama. Wigan’s composition of this image highlights this paradox because their physical proximity makes their self-contained stories more pronounced and poignant. The same sense of detachment is demonstrated in The Business (2011), a photo of another three strippers taken in Atlanta. In this image, the women are physically and psychologically separate. Each faces a different direction, with a woman named Payton staring at Wigan while sprawling on the floor. Wigan explains that Payton, and Mustang, whose back is to the viewer, developed a tight friendship based on family loss. Yet, his portraits present them as remote from one another. This arrangement poetically illustrates a paradox of sexual power. For strippers, it means independence not intimacy. But, vanity and competition can also create intense isolation. Underneath Wigan’s images of beautiful women lie these fraught emotional realities. Storytelling is Wigan’s motivation for his work. His other bodies of work, set in Africa and the West Indies, achieve the same sensuality and joy as his work in the United States. This sensitivity to character and descriptive details evolved from an early life as a perpetual stranger. Although his background is Scottish, Wigan was raised primarily in England. After boarding school in Kent, Wigan was sent by his father when he was thirteen to work on a ranch in Montana. Following this experience, he regularly joined his travel writer father on excursions through America’s extreme landscapes from Mexico to Alaska. At first, Wigan wanted to explore his experiences as a filmmaker. But an encounter with a photograph by Nan Goldin at London’s Frieze art fair compelled him to transition from film to still photography. Wigan was drawn to collect the photograph, Suzanne in Yellow Hotel Room (1981) and recounts that “After seeing this picture, I realized that I would be trying to recreate that image forever.” Although he shares Goldin’s empathy and deep fascination with ephemeral existence, his work is fundamentally opposed to hers. While Goldin photographed people whose personal demons forced them to throw life away, Wigan’s subjects embody hyperbolic vibrancy that embraces life itself. Goldin exposed the lonely lives of existentially isolated, abject individuals, but Wigan’s work is packed with displays of camaraderie, social drama and community. Wigan spent time living with his subjects but his images are not voyeuristic. In most of his images, his subjects directly engage with his camera and evidently enjoy posing and teasing him. Yet the engagement often implies an intimacy with his camera as a tool for his subjects’ self-expression, rather than an intimacy with Wigan. In other images, a humility enables his subjects to guide the images and he, the photographer, is not acknowledged. As he explains about The Hotel Geneva (2010), an image of people gathering outside a nightclub in Miami, “No one is looking at me because the group has supreme confidence. They own this space. However close I get, I can never enter. To them I have no relevance. I am invisible.” When photographing in the strip club, Wigan adopts the identity of a client capturing the dancers’ trained attention. Many of his images are consistent with the clubs’ own well-crafted pose, which often includes slick promotional videos featuring raw, hard-core hip-hop. In this environment, the dancers flaunt their bodies and Wigan responds with appropriate admiration. In images taken elsewhere in Atlanta, members of the The Bloods gang, introduced to Wigan by a mutual friend, confrontationally address Wigan’s camera with the clear intent of intimidating him and the viewers who will later see his images. Despite his appreciation for his subjects, Wigan’s title for his series, The Gods, is not a literal statement of admiration. As he explains, the title actually represents his subjects’ own self-fashioning. According to Wigan, “‘Gods’ is street slang that refers to a senior or veteran hustler. In conventional parlance the gods implies a reference to the Gods of the classical world. I feel an echo between the young thrill seekers in my images and sybaritic, amoral, gods of old. Both groups of ‘Gods’ exercise power at their whim. They frequently exact vengeance or distribute benefactions, never shying away from a campaign of seduction on the target of their desire.” Yet, some might sense a bitterly ironic undertone to the term since the under-privileged African-American subjects in Wigan’s images have little power in America’s imbalanced social order. Underlying racial tensions might be read into these images, although Wigan explains, “The tension which underline some pictures is between divergent cultures. Gallery viewers aspiring to be esteemed as cultural- connoisseurs are confronted by men whose culture represents outlaw lifestyles.” In reality, the men in these photographs were playfully posturing for Wigan’s camera but viewers’ assumptions of aggression reflect their own cultural context rather than revealing Wigan’s subjects’ true characters. The stories that Wigan’s work present express individuals’ personal and communities’ collective mythologies by grounding their myths in documentary depictions of social context. Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, whose photographs from the late seventies of impoverished African-American families in the South inspired Wigan to travel to Georgia, had a polemical purpose. Wigan instead believes that, “My work is not social commentary. I search to find and display only the lighter moments of life in the struggle. The good times are more interesting and enduring for me. The rest I will leave to be covered by someone else.” Surrounded by signs of America’s failed social structure, the creativity, electric sexual intensity and gritty physical beauty that Wigan captures is shaped by circumstances. “The people I have photographed for this show do not have jobs in the conventional sense,” he explains. “They hustle to survive. That means constant pressure and tension. Always having to break the rules.” Wigan’s work celebrates people whose personal lives and personal aesthetics are a stick of dynamite lit at both ends. — Ana Finel Honigman.

Creator:
Ivar Wigan (Scottish)
Creation Year:
2011
Dimensions:
Height: 25.6 in (65 cm)Width: 16.93 in (43 cm)
More Editions Sizes:
25.5 x 17.75 in. (65 x 45 cm). Edition of five (5).Price: $2,05433 x 24.75 in (84 x 63 cm). Edition of five (5).Price: $2,465
Medium:
Archival Pigment
Movement Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Los Angeles, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: The Gods1stDibs: LU73033572851

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Nude Photography

Materials

Archival Pigment

Aaron McPolin
"Consequence Of Title I" (FRAMED) Photography 60x40 in Ed. 1/3 by Aaron Mcpolin, 2019

$8,000

H 60 in W 40 in D 1.5 in

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