Peripheral Portraits draws a line and asks you to take a stand on one side or the other.
Is your nose an asshole? Or not.
In the Czech Republic, where Karolina Sussland grew up, standards of decency relied more on common sense and physical comfort than the puritanical aesthetic which seems dictated by morality in the U.S. Portraits draws on the faces of local Phoenicians to indulge Sussland’s preoccupation with questions of how decency and notions of embodiment are culturally determined. In this series of portraits, she has shifted her focus to the war on pornography. Armed with a web cam, she took portraits of her subjects, asking them to slightly tilt their heads back for the pictures. She then drew the portraits in pencil on paper, morphing noses and mouths into female genitalia. The portraits are familiar yet strange. The images are also formally uncanny because she renders her monstrous subjects with precision and beauty.
Portraits rhetorically asks: “What’s the problem with pornography, anyway?”
Karolina thinks the answer could be as plain as the nose on your face.
