About the Book
Utopia Centerfolds At Play brings together three artists’ projects – Brandon Isralsky’s Centerfolds and Fuckboys , Ina Jang’s Utopia, and Dean Sameshima’s Young Men At Play — to constellate explorations of censorship, ephemera, and sexuality across gender and social spectrums.
While each artist’s work employs unique visual strategies, they all begin with culturally specific, appropriated images of the body, which they treat to speak to their current perspectives, connecting geographies, nationalities, and ethnicities. The book features a uniquely designed fold-out cover that doubles as a poster as well as a must-read introduction by Mizz Even, titled Fuck Hugh.
About the Author :
Dean Sameshima lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received his MFA in 2001 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California. Sameshima has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally including most recently Histories of Sexuality, Museu de Arte (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil; The Locker Room Show, Plymouth Rock, Zurich, CH in 2017; Art/AIDS America, touring exhibition, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; December (Playback 1), Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan in 2016. He has also had various solo exhibitions specifically, Dean Sameshima, McNamara Art Projects (In collaboration with Peres Projects, Berlin), Hong Kong, China; Dean Sameshima, Naming Rights, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England and 647(d), GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA. Sameshima is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA and has been included in many publications.
Ina Janglives and works in New York City. Her works have been shown in internationally acclaimed galleries and festivals, including the New York Photo Festival, Daegu Photo Biennale Paris Photo, Unseen and Flatland Gallery in Amsterdam.
She was a Foam Talent and a finalist at the Hyeres Festival in 2011. In 2016, Photo District News announced her as one of the PDN 30 Emerging Photographers. Her latest project, Utopia, was shown last year at Musee de beaux-arts Le Locle in Switzerland. Her works have been published in Time Magazine, British Journal of Photography, IMA Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.
Brandon Isralsky’s work is rooted in fashion photography and pin-up art. His practice relies on existing images which he scans, prints out, tears apart and marks upon to prompt a larger conversation around misogyny, media representation, and the male gaze. His signature wheat-pasted tag, a unique re-appropriation of a woman’s cleavage, has become a defining image in his growing body of work, which is showcased, collected, and shared in the age of Instagram.
A military brat of Afro-Peruvian and Polish-Jewish descent, Israksly grew up on Governors Island and became enamored with metropolitan street life from an early age because its close proximity to Manhattan. He studied photography and video in the Master’s program at the School of Visual Arts and has shown his work at the Museum of Sex and 51 Orchard, among others.
Review :
Despite its candy-colored invitations, Jang’s work in “Utopia,” contains dissent. Her images perform a clever kind of trick. The real women have got away, and in each faceless female shape we find not windows to a soul but, instead, a two-way mirror. The implied beholder — Jang’s true subject — is left with vacant playthings, and those of us on the other side of the pane see the deficits of his vision that were there all along.
Katie Ryker, The New Yorker Magazine, April 22. 2018
Brandon Isralsky is taking vintage ‘Playboy’ magazine’s penchant for taboo to another level: one much more thoughtful, more artistic, and, consequently, decidedly more woke than ever before.
Emma Banks, Billboard, July 21, 2017
Each artist critiques the source of pornography’s cultural collateral damage and utilizes aesthetic strategies that defy the image-products of sexual fantasy in subversive (Jang), aggressive (Isralsky) and ironic (Sameshima) methodologies. Throughout the 64 pages of Utopia Centerfolds At Play, the work of the three artists intertwines in colorful conversation. Pictures dance around the page spreads in a sharp and playful edit, and the bold hues, hard-edged marks, and repeatedly casual sights of male genitals make the book an enormously lyrical read but the playfulness of the book belies more series concerns on sexuality and representation.
Gregory Eddi Jones, In The In-Between Journal of New Media Photography, April 15, 2019
