03 Works, Tyler Shields' Gators , with Footnotes #89

Tyler Shields

Gator

Dibond with Lustre Film lamination

54 x 72 in (137.16 x 182.88 cm)

Private collection

On a flight from Paris to London? British actress Jane Birkin, sitting next to Jean-Louis Dumas, Executive Chairman of Hermès (1978-2006), was complaining that she couldn't find a bag suitable for her needs as a young mother.

Tyler Shields

Gator Birkin Hands, c. 2012

Dibond with Lustre Film lamination

22.5" x 30"

Private collection

"Hermes Porosus Crocodile skin is considered the most exclusive of the exotics and is made from the smallest scales."

Tyler Shields

Black Birkin, c. 2021

Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper

70" x 70"

Private collection

Born in 1982, Tyler Shields’ work derives from a unique history directing music videos and working with the legendary skateboarding icon Tony Hawk. Mr. Shields has produced images that play with notions of the gaze, power structures, hyper-realism, iconoclastic-tendencies and cinematographic practice. 

Shield’s technical brilliance as a photographer has much more to do with the shift in focus from the fragility of the “celebrity photographer” to the output of the contemporary art medium. Most of the talented people who work with him include actors who are serious about their profession, but are not celebrities. People will go to him to make art rather than celebrity photography.

Mr. Shields’ work isn’t about celebrity – it’s about working with colleagues and friends in his social sphere who want to make art. They share an obsession to create, to make, to own, to expose, to play. His work is as much a collection of documentations of his sphere of influence and inspire his work. They are active participants rather that spectators. Eroticism, torture, decadence are all mere mediums that seem to remain eternally the same and only enhanced by the participant’s own injected identity and experience. It is the glossy mortality of the space of the human condition that is the only true crystal lens that the world inside and out, can be seen in the creation of a new type of fiction. Tyler Shields captures a new type of American life while exploring the fictional nature of the historical and the classic.-- 

Sotheby’s named Shields’s “The Warhol of his generation” in 2019. More on Tyler Shields

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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