In The Name Of Love

iMOCA is proud to present In The Name Of Love, a solo exhibition by Slava Mogutin, showcasing a series of 24 recent medium format portraits produced by the artist as traditional analog C-prints.

“For over a decade Slava Mogutin, a New York-based Russian artist and author, has been known for a photographic body of work that ranges from highly stylized, iconographic images to portraits that blend the boldness and honesty of police mug shots with the fantasy and desire of vintage pornography.

While still inviting voyeurism, his recent work hinders the viewer’s ability to see and decipher an image. He merges landscape backgrounds, which seem to be based on vernacular conventions and snapshot photography of people in front of scenic landscapes, with human forms. Nuanced explorations of changes in atmosphere are obtained by transforming a simple observation—a deer skull on a chair—into a complex photographic experience describing perception and the passage of time. It is as if the artist has carefully stitched together different moments in time.

Lushly colored images test connections between the descriptive clarity of photography and the haze of memory. Layered shots of people and nature come together and seem to blend into or grow out of nature itself. The work has become more optical and doesn’t have a static composition. It implies movement both by the camera and whatever activity that is motivating the image.