Alexander Medlin II & His Ghost • Photograph of a Room, 2025 • digital photograph
Throughout the latter months of 2020 I was pouring over the work of Queer photographer and personal luminary, Steven Arnold. His ecstatic, dream-derived tableau vivants performed, for me, a switchback of media: the photographic image read as painterly.
In contemplating this, I received the mental image of an artistic opposite, paintings that read as directly photographic. A room set with objects which capture a narrative, presentationally “real” and lucid, but is instead a series of deceptively painted works placed within in a three-dimensional space.