NEW YORK, NY.- Laurence Miller Gallery is presenting selected works from the surreal, erotic, seductive, primordial photographs of Roger Mertin, from his series Plastic Love Dream. Published in a limited edition portfolio in 1983, these prints remain today a powerful tribute to this unique artist who explored the boundaries of photography in terms of both subject and technique.
The pictures in the series Plastic Love Dream are statements about the IDEA of the erotic package. If they are erotic, they are so coincidentally. There is a kind of distance, a kind of intimate showcase effect in these pictures that forces us to consider the women as Bodies. Our experience of these Bodies is a refractory one, potential and “mental.” The light does not caress or penetrate – it rebounds. The Bodies are fragmented. “Erogenous Zones” isolated or exaggerated, they are shiny latex dolls waiting to be used, neutral in their protective shields of light and transparent armour. The spaces are ambiguous, undefined, quiet. Even the landscapes are close; they are settings, not places. Their location is somewhere within our minds. The prints themselves are hard and brilliant; undeniable facts, brittle mysteries which despite their tangibility, remain distant. Reflecting upon their surfaces, we are challenged to activate the scenario placed before us. We are reminded that our plastic obsessions are waiting to be consumed. -- Gary Metz, Excerpted from the Introduction to the Plastic Love Dream Portfolio
Roger Mertin was born in 1942 and attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, earning a BFA degree in 1965. This was followed by graduate work with Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop. Mertin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976. His work was exhibited widely throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, including in Mirrors and Windows at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1978. His photographs have been widely collected in Europe, Canada and the United States. Roger Mertin died in 2001.
