TOBY BARNES


One Hundred
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"100 Faces of Tom Delay" In the sullied millieu of contemporary politics, former US Representative Tom Delay's recent corruption indictment and in particular, his mugshot, offers Barnes a site for exploring the paradoxes of contemporary representation. Printed during the heat of the indictment hearings across thousands of national and local newspapers, the mugshot went unnoticed by the great majority of Americans given its strategic manipulation to look like a portrait, undiscernable and innocuous. Working through the "innocence" and populism instrumentally projected and exploited by the mugshot, Barnes counter-manipulates Delay’s amorphous image and reshapes it in the form of familiar social and cultural icons, shocking and provoking the spectator to resist the desire for forgetfulness and non-action of the original image, in all suggesting an alternative, if unintended, form of confessional. Exhibited as part of the "Peekskill Project", Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, September to October 2006.