Patrick McNabb
Contact prints
October 12th - November 17th, 2019
In Contact prints McNabb introduces a new body of work exploring human relationships, sexuality, sex acts, and their interconnectedness through images. These works directly depict sex-acts as a strategy to experience, partake, and view them. Entangled bodies in darkened rooms are captured in their most desirous and intimate moments. On the surface of the prints are water-marks, fix stains, and solarized tones – thus keeping a constant reference to how they were created – and also referencing McNabb himself as the photographer and printmaker. The artist’s physical relationship to the process of image-creation is parallel to the relationship with his subjects. McNabb views the body as a site for exploration. The same can be said about his prints: they are made in a darkened room where the artist manipulates the results in a tactile way.
His interaction with those being photographed is also intensely dynamic. The role of a photographer is often seen as a dominant one, but here, power shifts back and forth between the subject and image-maker. In each of the encounters that McNabb depicts, he elicits a continuous exchange with those being photographed. McNabb photographs primarily with a 4x5 view camera, often creating a distance between the subject and photographer due to its size and time-intensive process. However, McNabb additionally uses smaller, more agile film and digital cameras, to introduce multiple perspectives and relationships to his subjects. The varying modes of photographing emphasize his process in being both behind and in front of the camera, as participant, and observer. By using analog photographic techniques for both the capture and the print, McNabb creates a direct, unmitigated relationship to the physicality of his subjects and the images themselves.
To accompany the exhibition of photographs, McNabb invited artist Corinna D’Schoto to produce a sculpture considering architecture’s role in differentiating the public and private.
Patrick McNabb is a visual artist currently based in New York. He received his BFA from Tisch School of the Arts in 2014 and his MFA from The School of Visual Arts in 2016. He attended Vermont Studio Center in March of 2019, where he was the recipient of a partial fellowship. He has curated for Re: Art Show – an artist-run, ever-changing group show formerly located in the Old Pfizer Factory in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited internationally.