Intimate Human

Hedreen Gallery, Lee Center for the Arts, Seattle, WA

Artist:  Mel Erice & Jon Huck
Medium: Photography
Run of show: March 29 – May 24, 2007
Venue: Hedreen Gallery, Lee Center for the Arts

Press Release:

Seattle - Portraiture sets up expectations: we will see the sitter; we will learn something of their character. Intimate Human, the first exhibition of portrait photography at the Lee Center for the Arts, challenges these expectations and asks us to consider the criteria by which we assess ‘individuality.’ In two extensive portrait series, photographers Mel Erice and Jon Huck distill universally intimate details as signifiers of their subjects’ personalities.

In Erice's For Your Scrutiny, topless women and bottomless men hold chalkboards over their chests or crotches. Though the faces are cropped out of these black-and-white images, Erice’s photographs powerfully emphasize the individuality of the subject: on each chalkboard, the sitter has written her breast size, or his penis length. Our desire to read character in the chalked handwriting, along with Erice’s references to documentary photography, implicates us as viewers in complicated ways. Does a heavily chalked line indicate confidence? Have the subjects told the truth? What exactly are we staring at?

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