Love, Lust, and Other Complications

Love, Lust, and Other Complications
Hannah Harley Bouleau

Love, Lust, and Other Complications interrogates the body as a site of negotiation, power, and friction. Spanning works created between 2014 and 2016, the exhibition examines the systems through which modern American society expresses love, lust, and desire - and the power inherent in each of these areas. By exploring the grey areas of digital intimacy, sexual agency, and the weight of memory, the work deconstructs how we are seen and how we return the gaze.

The exhibition is focused on the creation and curation of intimacy and the Millennial Generation:

In Love in the Digital Age, the artist documents the peak cultural saturation of Tinder. By compositing 80 user profiles, the work archives a specific moment when human complexity was reduced to a binary "swipe." Though this has not changed significantly with the advent of new software, the impetus for this gamified matchmaking was the explosion of Tinder’s popularity. This series highlights the restructuring of the romantic landscape, where the interface of five images and three sentences necessitates a rapid-fire analysis of identity.

In Untitled (Pornography), physical pornographic magazines were collaged to highlight the skin tones prevalent in international issues that promoted diversity. The Millennial Generation bridged the gap between digital and physical pornography, and this series examines the skin tones prevalent in the physical artifacts. 

The exhibition moves from observation to physical confrontation. The Uncomfortable Piece archives a 2015 performance that flipped the traditional power dynamics between performer and spectator. Artists Hannah Harley Bouleau and Ren Rathbone documented the audience's uncomfortability while presenting as the topless performers. The work transforms vulnerability into a disruptive and confrontational tool. 

The theme continues in The In-Between, which investigates the psychological friction of coerced compliance in sexual experience. These studio photographs tell the stories of individuals who felt their sexual agency was violated, but not to the point of a criminal violation. The importance of this work is in highlighting the space between enthusiastic consent and overt violation.

The final section of the exhibition explores the impact of intimacy on the psyche and the physical space. In Portraits of Ex-Lovers, the artist re-enters the personal spaces of former partners to map the emotional connotations of shared history. 

This exhibition protrays the awakening for the Millennial Generation as it grapples with the rise of digital technology’s interference with romantic and sexual relationships. It challenges the viewer to look past the surface of the swipe to see the complex infrastructure of human connection.