Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present
dead men don’t look like me,
an exhibition of new photographs by Paul Schiek.
Presented are 15
portraits of men re-photographed from 1950s-era mug shots found by the
artist’s friend Mike Brodie in an abandoned Georgia prison. Brodie gifted
the mug shots to Schiek, who then edited the original cache of hundreds
down to a select few, cropped the images to remove all official
documentary references while leaving stains, staple marks, tears and other
signs of age, and enlarged the prints on highly reflective chromogenic
paper to imbue them with personal and cultural meaning beyond their
original purpose.
Mug shots are
compelling by nature, and Schiek was particularly struck by his subjects’
brutally glamorous attractiveness, a blood-and-guts charm he describes as
“the American male stench.” Like young actors posing for a Hollywood
headshot, they smirk and leer at the camera with palpable defiance,
collars popped on their standard issue prison shirts. These are
haunting and seductive images that reveal the interplay between cinematic
fantasy and real-life criminality in the concept of the American
antihero—from the iconic movie rebel James Dean, to the mass murderer
Charles Starkweather, who infamously resembled Dean, to Martin Sheen,
whose character in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film
Badlands was
itself based on Starkweather.
Schiek also drew
inspiration from Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin
Death Trip, a 1973 cult publication
recounting the violent and eerie history of a small, Victorian-era
Midwestern town through historical photographs and documents. A formative
artistic influence on Wisconsin native Schiek, Lesy’s book asserts "the
pictures you are about to see are of people that were once actually
alive," an assertion Schiek echoes in his comments on his own work. “The
truth in the photos is these men died. Like all men die. Like I will die.”
Recognizing the thin line that connects and separates these men from him,
Schiek worked reductively to organize the photographs according to certain
obvious visual cues—age, race, hairstyle, bearing—arriving at a group that
drew a passing visual resemblance to himself, though the lives portrayed
played out differently than his own.
In romanticizing
and repurposing these images, enshrining them as icons of dark impulses,
Schiek resurrects them as art objects. By utilizing them to wrestle
with notions of the self, he stares smack in the face of his own
mortality. What results is something rich and unwieldy in its
dichotomies—a self-portrait created from typology, fiction created from
history, and optimism gleaned from morbidity.
Paul Shiek was
born and raised in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He attended California College
of the Arts and currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2011, his work
was included in the California Biennial, at the Orange County Museum of
Art, and Hauntology,
at the Berkeley Art Museum, curated by Scott Hewicker and Lawrence Rinder.
Schiek is the founder of TBW Books, a publishing imprint that has produced
books of his images and those of other photographers. His work is
included in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as many
private collections.
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