PLAY - - : - -
THE SCENE GALLERY, NEW YORK, NY 2001
video, installation, performance, photography/painting
curated by Kóan Jeff Baysa
"Aaron Sheppard's work explores the terrain of his own body shaped by fashion and pornography constructs of physical perfection. Working alone, he arranges sets within which he videotapes and photographs himself, creating and morphing through serial personas with props and materials applied to his body. With mirrors creating a twin accomplice and monitors simultaneously displaying live and/or previously taped images of himself, documentation of the entire scene is from a single vantage point but analyzes motive and response from a position of simultaneity. In the exhibition, the viewer is situated as voyeur in a peep show while Sheppard induces a nystagmus of the gaze shuttling between past and present, contesting the borders between reality and artifice, storytelling and truth, entertainment, rehearsal, taboo, and play --:--"
-Kóan Jeff Baysa, curator