In the Dark We Live and Love — Nuke Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 11, 2011 → January 7, 2012

“Drag is a political art form. A labor-intensive process that uses a wide-ranging spectrum of media. The complicated canvas of a male body being converted to female starts with the precise technical execution of plucking, tucking, and styling. The process can often put most painters to shame with its fine brushstrokes to “beat a face flawless,” as it is called in drag terminology. Stepping their stilettoed feet outdoors, the entire world becomes a stage and performance art begins. Often in a nightclub setting the context is lost to camp frivolity. Once again, it takes an understanding, outside eye to properly give it context and its due place on a gallery wall.”

Jeremy Kost

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, Jeremy Kost was destined to arrive in New York one day, like one of the heroes in a Lou Reed song. A photographer by accident, or rather as a cover for his shyness in the fashionable clubs and parties he frequented following his move, this Warholian Rastignac began by immortalising personalities, armed with a Polaroid camera. Kost flirts with the limits of nudity- the moment at which the nude becomes sacred. In its desecration, the sexual is restored to its original beauty. In his photographs he retrieve aspects of ancient paintings, their modern reconstitution tracing back to the relics of a lost civilization. One shoulder, an arm, the feet… Kost’s gaze is syncopated, the body mutilated, then reconstructed in his photographs.