Michael Marcelle was born in New Jersey in 1983. He graduated from Bard College in 2005 and received an MFA from Yale University in 2013. His work has been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, Pioneer Works, Interstate Projects and Transmitter, being also featured in The New Yorker, Vice, Vogue Juxtapoz, among others. His first book, Kokomo, was released last fall by Matte Editions.
The photographer’s vision is surely far from being common and banal, astonishing instead through complex layers of meaning and values he conceptually and visually blends.
About ‘Red Strawberry II’– words by Michael Marcelle:
These photographs are from a new ongoing series called Red Strawberry II, which pulls away from the familial background of Kokomo (my previous body of work) into a wider, more brutal perspective. Deconstructing the line between fantasy and reality, desire and danger, and the natural and synthetic, the work focuses on the intersection of queerness and science-fiction in the physical world. The pictures describe a contemporary landscape that is both primordial and futuristic, nostalgic for everything at once. Everything is too bright, too colorful; a cloying, hyper-ripe piece of fruit from another dimension, or a hallucination of a CGI rendering.
While deeply entrenched in fantasy, the work is also firmly grounded in our own physical reality. Primarily foregoing retouching and post-production, most of these pictures were created in-camera using practical special effects, often the same techniques used in b-grade science fiction films of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The result is an uncanny inversion of our own world, reflecting and emphasizing the emerging dystopian elements of our cultural political climate into a strange new kingdom, blossoming all around us.
Rather than the traditional visual description of queerness that is relegated to the body, this work instead builds an entirely queer world. Desire is stretched and mutated across bodies, landscapes, and still lifes, invoking revulsion and attraction in equal turns.
