Vermillion - Genevive Blais & Chris Bahry

Flow Space Gallery is excited to present Vermillion by artists Genevieve Blais & Chris Bahry opening July 9th from 6-8 pm

Artist Statement:
“I think, therefore I am" has become "I post, therefore I am." Inside that logic, Vermillion proposes that pleasure can no longer be felt – only performed for an audience that may or may not be watching.

The work borrows the lexicons of hyper-sexuality, kitsch, and voyeuristic cinema, putting the viewer in the position of the Peeping Tom and then withholding the payoff. Desire here is manufactured: bleached, dyed, and sugared back into a synthetic idea of itself, staged for no reason but to be looked at. These are vanitas for the image economy, and like all vanitas, the sweetness is a cover for the rot underneath. Scenes built only to be wanted, captured at the moment that wanting disfigures into performance.

And to look, is to risk being caught looking, but the images give nothing back. Faces are shadowed, obscured, blurred; the bodies have no identity, the pleasure no author. Watched long enough, the cheapest thing turns holy and the synthetic symbol becomes real.