Ira Tattelman
 

Steamed
1995

Photo collage

  About the work

 

Through design, photography, Xerography, and collage, I am interested in constructing new spatial relationships out of existing ones. While overlapping one photograph on top of another, the images remain independent, yet their overlapping produces a third image. This process heightens issues of scale, sensuality, and the viewing frame. Through layering, material surfaces are intensified and different kinds of spaces are juxtaposed and created. My project over the last four years has focused on gay bathhouses. While they are no longer intense sites of practice, the emptied buildings, locked and shuttered, remain on the streets as a reminder of their absent community. By inhabiting these decimated sites of gay male desire, I use images of the baths and their performance stages to investigate the structures of individual activities, collective encounters, vistas, and displacements. While my intent is not to idealize these spaces, I hope to allow them an important place in the development of a gay male community. The baths offer variety and opportunity, and propose new ways to explore relationships among men. Technology offers new ways to discover, invent, and re-create the bathhouse.” I.T.

1960
born
1982
B.A. Columbia University, New York, NY
1994
M. ARCH. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
 
Associate architect, Elefante Mallari Architects, Washington, DC; lives in Washington, DC