“Fan culture: like fanatic, like fantastic. Stretching, cropping, stacking, zooming, bobbing and weaving, the works of Marie Baldwin, Eseosa Edebiri and Bob Luck constitute and constellate a sumptuous hall of mirrors in which our cultish desires are refracted more than reflected. In Untouched, Un-, culled, screen-shotted, slayer-layered and dissected pop culture detritus is transformed, both materially and affectively, into tactile textile and theatrical installation. 

The internet gave us the illusion of everything. Everything as a -ness, as an impossible object to which all others were tied. It’s a fantasy of completion: like a library made with rubber walls, each new self on its each new shelf. And besides, that’s a fantasy based on everything as one infinite thing instead of infinite one things and their iterative shadow selves. And, more apropos in this moment, is how it begs the fantasy of longing to be and to belong. The fan brings objects of their affection so close that their meanings shift and their agencies are confounded.

Like a new joke you ask an AI, here Rick James and Sailor Moon walk into a quilt. Angelic cartoons flex and flaunt the real, this time as awed rorschach. Sixties girl group regalia gets bigger and bigger until we almost break. The image becomes textual then contextual and then recontextualized and retconned, but not in a way that feels more familiar than precious.“

Writing by Jesse Malmed.

Photography by Ian Vecchiotti.