"Love is a Cannibal"

Tyler Coburn
Jesse Finley Reed
David Benjamin Sherry

Curated by Becky Smith

Exhibition: July 16 to September 13, 2008*
Reception: Wednesday, July 16th, 7 to 9 pm

Sloan Fine Art is pleased to present "Love is a Cannibal" curated by Becky Smith, owner of Bellwether, New York. Featuring works by Tyler Coburn, Jesse Finley Reed, and David Benjamin Sherry, the exhibition looks at the variety of ways these artists depict gay-male longing by using staged, constructed and manipulated photography.

Tyler Coburn works in a range of media, including photography, video, sculpture, and installation. For "Love is a Cannibal," he will exhibit three photographic works that combine allusions to art history, politics, and popular culture to explore the human and artistic tendency to dissemble identity through distortion, manipulation, and artifice.

Jesse Finley Reed will present photographs from his "If You’re Lonely…" series, which is comprised of backlit portraits of men he met through online communities in Berlin and New York. The anonymity of these encounters is materialized in the intense darkness that pervades the images, in which only the faintest outline of the sitters’ bodies is visible.

David Benjamin Sherry uses traditional photographic techniques to create images of desert landscapes, himself, his friends, and constructed sets, which are imbued with sensuality, mystery, and occult overtones. Manipulated to the edge of hallucination with exaggerated, saturated color and geometric abstractions, Sherry’s photographs merge autobiography with archetypal fantasy and are infused with feelings of longing and desire for visceral experience.

Tyler Coburn holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University, and has exhibited with The Centre of Attention, London, Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin, and Gavin Brown's Passerby, New York. His debut New York solo exhibition was held at March Gallery in Spring 2008, and his videos have screened at CRG Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and Ocularis, among others. Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview and a staff writer for Rhizome.

Jesse Finley Reed received his MFA in Photography from Yale in 2004, and is a recipient of the Larry Kramer Initiative Grant and the DAAD stipendium. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Arratabeer Gallery, Berlin, and has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, including group exhibitions at the Hamish McKay Gallery, NZ; The Breeder, Athens; PS 122 and Freight and Volume, New York; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles.

David Benjamin Sherry earned his MFA in Photography from Yale in 2007, and currently has a solo show on view in Berlin at Andre Schlechtriem Contemporary. He has also exhibited at Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna (solo); Goff + Rosenthal, Berlin; Andrew Kreps, New York; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Team Gallery, New York; and China Art Objects, Los Angeles.

Running concurrently with "Love is a Cannibal," in the gallery’s two back rooms, Sloan Fine Art will present "Summer Salon," a rotating exhibition in four parts with works by over twenty artists.

*Please note - the gallery will be closed for summer vacation August 25 - September 2.