Scott Alario
Ecstatic Consumption
March 17 - May 1, 2016
It is with great pleasure that the gallery announces Scott Alario: Ecstatic Consumption. This is the artist's second solo exhibition at Kristen Lorello and will feature eight new full color photographs made in a tri-color process. A succinct booklet, containing images of the works, and brief statements by the gallery and artist, will be available.
Scott Alario: Ecstatic Consumption marks an exciting broadening of Alario's exploration of portraiture and the subject of the family. Engaging a collaborative process in which he, his wife Marguerite, and children Elska and Marco work together to stage, perform, and edit the photographs, the exhibition pairs close-up views of singular objects in and outside the home with separate images of family members interacting with things around them: a bowl full of blueberries and a camping tent, for example. Using vibrant colors to capture feelings and objects, Alario blurs the distinction between person and thing, lending each a shared sense of excitement.
Departing from his previous exploration of multiple exposure in black and white photography, Alario's new full color images result from printing and overlaying three separate color-filtered photographs of the same scene. This technique was utilized by the 19th-Century Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and is explored today by photographers such as Jessica Eaton and Florian Maier-Aichen. Alario adapts the tri-color separation process to the genre of portraiture, using it to highlight time-based aspects of movement, feeling, and natural light. Of this process, Alario has noted:
My camera is static, though my subject matter is not. The time that it takes me to swap the color filter invites discrepancy between exposures. While it interests me that working this way speaks directly to
technical and historical photographic processes, I’m most excited by the accidents of the resulting images: the movement in between my three frames, and the mis-registered overlapping...Outside of the
reasons this process was originally developed, mainly a solution to reproduce the world’s color, I’m looking for: unseeable squirming, shifting, and growth, arms flailing in ecstasy, or light slowly moving across
our walls.
Scott Alario lives and works between Alfred, NY, and Providence, RI. He received a MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and a BFA from the Masachusetts College of Art in 2006. Group exhibitions include Love 2016, LeRoy Nieman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, 2016, and Touch the Moon, Louis B. James, 2014. His work has been discussed in Collector Daily, Time Lightbox, and Vice.com, among other publications. He is a 2013 Critical Mass Finalist and the recipient of a 2012 Fellowship Merit Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
