15 robertson_iso-jpg

Dave Hickey has defined beauty as the "iconography of desire". My series, ISO (in search of), reaches beyond desire, into the realm of idolatry. These images are culled from gay Internet dating sites such as www.gay.com, www.bigmuscle.com, www.jockbod.com, and www.m4m4sex.com–also known as "cruising" sites. The images are copied, enlarged, blurred, and otherwise manipulated to give the appearance of a luxurious studio figure study–one that incorporates the tropes of the cruising website profile pic (no head/face, semi-nude, etc). They are then output as large-scale rag paper fine art prints, thus granting corporeality to images that heretofore existed only as data on the web, becoming my "response" to the personal ad, and creating a subjective archive of these ephemeral images.