Kissing on Main Street

2004-2016; Forty SX-70 Polaroids and forty peep boxes. Each original Polaroid is mounted on mirrored plexiglass in a box with dark bronze translucent plexiglass laser-cut with an aperture and laser-engraved with an address. Installation. Dimensions variable.

If, as Joni Mitchell sang, “In France they kiss on Main Street,” what happens when I/we take composing plots for kisses uneasily preserved in Polaroid emulsion into the public space of the gallery? Kissing on Main Street aims the instant-developing Polaroid camera at the four-way intersection of sex, imaging technology, vulnerable exposure, and policing that is public intimacy and turns the space of gallery installation into a site for negotiating the difficult sensations but also the political possibilities of public intimacy. In the solicitation to look, Kissing on Main Street stages an encounter to pursue the questions of what happens in and to the intimate acts of the Polaroid once we are enfolded as voyeurs and what happens to us in our exposure as not neutral witnesses but intimate actors, peering into the mirror-lined peep show boxes that display them.  

Exhibited at the Kohler Gallery
Wriston Art Center Galleries
Lawrence University
April 1 - May 8, 2016

Kissing on Main Street, artist book and installation catalogue with essays by Beth Zinsli and Lia Gangitano (Appleton, WI and Minneapolis, MN: Lawrence University and Bookmobile, 2016).  In collection of Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York.