Ryan Gould
POV (Series)
DESCRIPTION
I’m interested in epistemology; specifically, I’m interested in how language and images interact and impact our understanding of the world.
Photographs have long been regarded as unmediated copies of reality, however visual rhetoric suggests that images conceal ideological mystification.
Language, on the other hand, evokes mental images resonant with our previous experiences with the associated text. This may be lived experience or virtual. In either case, we often neglect to question where certain associations have been formed.
This body of work, titled POV, situates itself within the framework of pornographic click-bait. If one has come to understand words like ‘wet’, ‘oral’, ‘hole’, etc. to be inherently sexual, do we then—when primed with these words or their visual counterpart—activate some sort of erotic charge?
AUTHOR
BIO
Ryan Harrison Gould (b. 1986) was born in Miami, Florida. His parents were importers of lithographic prints and introduced him to the arts at an early age. For Gould, the process of creating imagery begins with deconstructing the implications of contemporary sexuality. This body of work, titled POV, focuses on identifying the pornographic industry as the organization of power that informs and constructs the limits of our sexual imagination, and through its proliferation, has created a hyper-sexualized world. Drawing influence from popular keywords found in pornographic search results, Gould highlights the non-sexual that has become eroticized through language.
EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibitions
2014 - Communication & Medium, Gallery 27, Santa Barbara, California
Group Exhibitions
2016 - Awakening, ASMP. PhotoLA, Los Angeles, California
2015 - Second Nature. Gallery 27, Santa Barbara. California
2014 - The Third Effect, Gallery 27, Santa Barbara. California
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
2015 - Graduated magna cum laude from the Brooks Institute Master of Fine Arts Photography program.
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