PROXY ART GALLERY

PROXY GALLERY (the california collection): Your profile photo may be in these Profile Portraits! Thousands of enlarged (custom, patented algorithms) and enhanced photographs (now, likely several hundred thousands, soon over a million,) mostly low-res cellphone, web-cam, and low-end digital camera self-portraits (self-packaging), culled from dating/social websites -- as you might expect, there is some explicit content (more than is permitted here unfortunately: you really should see them all, but it probably makes little difference) -- fascinating and occasionally disturbing. I've decided to also add a painting-filter. You may realize that this is not the first time I've collected anonymous found-public imagery: notably dumpster-diving at photofinishers' in the 70's. And of course, the "Insatiable Abstraction Engine" -- collections from newsgroups. But come to think it, nearly all my work involves repeated multiples or collections of imagery. Whenever possible I retained any color casts, cropping and lighting. The portraits are actually very considered, sometimes selections made/altered merely to obscure the identity that they wished to presumably portray initially. Sunglasses are a popular ruse, as are close-ups of cleavage, butts, tattoos, feet and groins. (Curiously, I've yet to see a picture of hands... ok, now I have: some intricate fingernails and the love/hate finger-tats.) Many feature-obilerating camera-flash-portraits in the bathroom mirror. And some, but surprisingly few, are filched from somewhere online, but this must be a risky choice in the event of an 'actual encounter.' How much introductory information/description do you want to put out there to begin with? There are some very creative, even artful, solutions to this dilemma. Various select groups of portraits are included in each PDF ebook/catalogue for $250 (sorry about the price but it was a hellish amount of work and I guarantee you won't be disappointed or YMB), and must be ordered directly. The images contain sufficient resolution to print them out on letter-size/A4 paper for an instant exhibition. Use my verified Paypal account to have the DVD delivered at no charge: [bbrace@eskimo.com; http://bbrace.laughingsquid.net/buy-into.html] Having been recently kicked-off Facebook (there was a depicted nipple!), and losing 5,000 so-called friends - the perfect place to host a social-media profile-portrait-museum, I've decided to also open an online storefront where individual high-res files will sell for only $1/each. [http://cart.iabrace.com] The prints of course required different custom algorithms and some masterful retouching -- they look great!  Technically given the incredibly diverse range of imagery it was difficult to make them all equally legible; despite a variety of intricate processing directives, the scripts would inevitably crash or be unable to render a decent image. These were handled individually as were the painting-filters. If I receive a reasonable number of orders, I'll offer additional states of the union or countries... but California had to be the place to begin. Sure to be a collectors' (socio-anthropologists') item! An amazing and compelling, collective portrait! The interspersed military imagery (or maybe something else), also introduces a new spin on the hopes for this already tenuous social-media culture. I've had to organize/sub-divide these in some fashion, so by state/country seems to be the prevailing approach. And given how often workers are compelled to move around, there's more of a local difference in cultural self-perception, body language, and social-sexual proclivity than you might expect. It really is a perhaps overlooked (overly-present), socially significant era when a massive proportion of the population is able to individually exorcise their self-imagery instead of being routinely dependent on existing systematized systems of portraiture and presentation -- which is not to say that it's entirely free from stylistic-cultural-corporate constraints and codification (and why, for now at least, I left the imagery in a nearly random arrangement), but the individual, probably for the first time ever, is seen freely negotiating a shifting porous skein of varied reception... well, something like that...