Michael Moore ’08

In this current series of work, my fascination with the body is both metaphorical and literal. As 21st-century citizens, we struggle with the dissonant irony of digital intimacy that at once connects us to the global population and disconnects us from the people physically near us.

The anonymous nude becomes a metaphor for our competing desire to share the intimate and personal — beliefs, biases, our bodies themselves — while, at the same time, moving through systems of anonymizing depersonalization. This allows us to divorce our movement in this space from our own names and faces and, often, our core personal identities. The people we meet in online spaces are rarely the truest versions of themselves. Thus, we create selves who act in ways that serve our momentary interests but do not act in ways that are aligned with a singular personal identity.

The focus on male figures in white towels draws its inspiration from the visual language of the gay bathhouse. Queer spaces have long existed to maintain a delicate balance between competing versions of the self. While these physical spaces are no longer ubiquitous, online platforms have created omnipresent virtual bathhouses, in which individuals can enter a semi-anonymous space from their phone — on their commute, at work, at home.

What is visible or invisible, raw or edited, highlighted or downplayed, forms the terms by which we interact. We are, perhaps as we always were, exposed or not exposed on our own terms.