BILL DURGIN

Nudes and Still Lifes is a series of paired photographs that riff on classical painting genres. Nudes: bodies contorted and reshaped into uncanny figures. Still Lives: beautifully intricate arrangements of flora and fauna. Composed to unsettle the relative size of each subject by presenting them on a similar scale, the juxtapositions of the Nudes and the Still Lifes feed off each other, reverberating between ideas of attraction and abjection.

For the Nudes images, I work with dancers, models, and my own body to create sculptural shapes through contortion and perspective. Resisting traditional views of figuration, I move toward an image of the figure as a living sculpture of muscle, fat, and bone. After composing the Nudes image, I create a Still Life to pair it with, connecting the images through composition and location. I arrange flowers, fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat, delicately intertwined with wig hair traces of the figure to sculpt a Still Life that is both subtly grotesque and elegant.

The photographs are shot with Fuji Provia 4x5 transparency film, scanned, and presented as digital C-Prints on Kodak Endura paper. There is minimal postproduction retouching. I retouch mainly for color, tone, and occasional blemishes. All images are presented as they have been photographed.