Delphine Balley Delphine Balley’s photographic series reconstruct and dramatise news items, family situations, pre or post-crime scenes and true stories with thoroughness and a pronounced taste for motif and detail. These playlets, as metaphors of everyday life, are closed, timeless spaces that skilfully combine reality and fantasy. The artist’s creative quirkiness transports the spectator into an unusual, strange, worrying, sometimes unsettling universe which is also marked by humour and derision. Armed with her camera, Balley moves between the chronic, the journalistic, narration, the tale and the cinema. From her multiple influences (Velázquez, Goya, Ellroy, Kubrick) she has inherited a particular type of perception, and with her framings, lighting schemes and subtle compositions she makes pictures that are both classical and innovative.
Huîtres (Oysters), 2012. 140 cm by 110 cm. Courtesy Gallery Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris. Copyright Delphine Balley.
delphineballey.com
Carlton Scott Sturgill
22
Detail of DS Couple Seeks Female switch - mw4w - 3131 (Cinci) - Her, 2013. Paint chip sample mosaic; shirts; vintage Ralph Lauren gift box; antique table; windows; baseboard molding; vintage screws and hardware; wire; floral tape 59 in by 31.5 in by 36 in.
Inspired by the bedroom communities of the Midwest, Carlton Scott Sturgill’s work examines the conflict between our need to push our individual sexual boundaries and our desire to appear as ambassadors of a white-picket-fence America. Using objects sourced from the suburban landscape, such as paint chip samples from Home Depot and clothing from the all-American company Ralph Lauren, along with imagery and text appropriated from the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, he explores the dichotomy between public persona and private sexual behavior. His paintings, sculptures and paint chip mosaics use the vernacular of the American heartland to scratch the surface of suburban pretense, exploring the compulsion to veil ourselves behind the facade of a commoditized version of the “American Dream.” carltonscottsturgill.com