Lyle Ashton Harris (is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation art, and performance art. Harris uses his works to comment on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer, black man.
Now the Albert Merola Gallery in Ptown is presenting the first public presentation of a remarkable exhibition of his photographs which covers a critical early period of maturation and development in his work.
These are photos about being young, about being seen, about sex and love, about the search for happiness and the drive to feel everything one can. There is a kind of slow intimacy depicted here,a tenderness of touch, of softness, of the ease of the familiar. As such, it seems an especially appropriate time to be revisiting them, and re-contextualizing them by bringing them into the dialogue and succession of contemporary gay images, while at the same time demonstrating their interconnectedness with his other work. The photographs in this exhibition are intrinsically joined to both narratives. ,
Lyle is taking a deep look back in this exhibition at the early days that formed his development and growth as an artist. He told us that he is thinking about the meaning in these photographs against the backdrop of today’s image bombardment via social media. Within the context of the emergence of “social awareness,” Black Lives Matter, the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights, Zoom meetings, Grindr, performances at a fingertip via the internet, and all the other demands and intrusions on our psyche, these seem to exist as an oasis for regenerating the spirit.
These photographs are all black and white gelatin silver prints which bring a physical sensuousness to the photographs and align them within the traditional, historical narrative of photography, as well as with some of Harris’s earliest seminal works. Hours and Days drifts through days and nights of intimacy between Lyle and some of his close lovers.
Lyle Ashton Harris Hours and Days ~A Suite of 10 Photographs July 29 - August 17, 2022 Albert Merola Gallery 424 Commercial Street Provincetown, MA 02657
