Shopping for Pleasure Julie Sando

Date

2005

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Oakland University

Abstract

Excerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Julie Sando has been staking out massage parlors in a recent body of work. The level of disengagement from the subject in these new photographs, Best Sensuous Hands and its accompanying series Rudimentary (both 2004), is startling. Her most detached work to date, these site photographs convey an acute clinical distance emphasizing the deadpan banal pathos of these low facades and their entranceways. Mixing the metonymic and symbolic, “Tropical Relaxing Massage,” “Oriental Rose,” “Head Shoulder Waist Leg Foot,” and “Cleopatra Massage and Spa” are some of the photographed texts that lure in prospective shoppers. Shot in prosaic daylight, all glamour is leeched from these sampled images. Are they base facades or is there something brave in their fatigued doggedness to stay in business; are they documentary photographs, metaphors of alienation or is a social critique being perpetrated?

Description

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Oakland University Art Gallery, January 15 - February 7, 2005. Contains Contains essay by Dick Goody and interview with the artist.

Keywords

Oakland University Art Gallery, Oakland University. College of Arts and Sciences, Exhibition catalogs, Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts

Citation