MICHELE ABELES: Hi, I’m Michele Abeles and you're looking at a group of work that I made between 2009 and 2012.
EVA RESPINI: Abeles explores spatial relationships between objects by layering and fragmenting her images. She also tries to mimic the experience of looking at photographs on computers and mobile devices.
MICHELE ABELES: I started to think about how the space of photographs change[s] when we see them on a computer screen. Also the way we view photographs more and more on the touch screen devices, and the way we interact with them through these physical gestures such as the swipe. So then I thought that that could be another space that has this interaction of the physical and the virtual in it.
Ninety percent of the elements you see in these photographs are images generated by me.
EVA RESPINI:
To make her still life compositions, Abeles uses generic everyday objects, such as potted plants, wine bottles, even male figures. Her photographs treat her male subjects as objects, rather than humans.
MICHELE ABELES:
I didn't want the pictures to be portraits of people. Because I think when people look at photographs and the photographs include faces, you start to identify, with the person as an individual.
Eventually I came to photograph men 'cause I decided that they're basically the neutral subject for a culture. A blank slate.
I found the male models from an ad I placed on Craigslist. And I decided to have different models come into the studio so that they could look like different body parts of the same person, but then when you look at them more closely and in a series, you could see that they were actually different people.