| All grown up, we miss and yearn for the sensational experience of childhood: to wonder, love or fear; to have one’s curiosity aroused, spirit lifted and mind’s eye opened, in revelation. Through my work, I return to this childlike state, and I invite my audience along. I enjoy stereoscopic imaging in three-dimensions for several reasons, the foremost of which is the apparent pleasure and surprise that the artworks bring to my audience when they receive that novel and impressive visual experience that is unavailable in any other medium. |  |
Boris Starosta
All grown up, we miss and yearn for the sensational experience of childhood: to wonder, love or fear; to have one’s curiosity aroused, spirit lifted and mind’s eye opened, in revelation. Through my work, I return to this childlike state, and I invite my audience along.
I enjoy stereoscopic imaging in three-dimensions for several reasons, the foremost of which is the apparent pleasure and surprise that the artworks bring to my audience when they receive that novel and impressive visual experience that is unavailable in any other medium. These images can, tangibly, render not just three-dimensional space and volume, but also transparency, reflectivity and iridescence as well as other uniquely stereoscopic effects. Through the use of certain techniques, all of these visual elements can be distorted, amplified and modified—providing a creative palette far greater and more complex than what is commonly available in the “flat” visual arts (line, color, value, texture and etc.), and that indeed reaches beyond what can be perceived in the real world.
I take pleasure in the technical craft required and in the physicality involved not just in the making of three-dimensional images, but also in their presentation. Showing stereoscopic imagery presents both challenges and opportunities in terms of the perceptual human factors and in the installation design itself.
Finally, there is the difficult task of bringing these works to the attention of the wider world of fine art. When recognized at all, three-dimensional artwork is known as a low-brow medium, with a long history in the commercial arts, in entertainment and in comics. Without antecedents, fine art examples of “3D” are largely unknown, resulting in the fact that juries are inexperienced in assessing the format, and that submission guidelines cannot always accommodate it. Stereoscopic images always require some kind of extra device—3D glasses, goggles or an installed stereoscope—to separate and direct the necessary imagery into each eye. Although I consider myself a photographer, this technical limitation means that I must be an installation artist as well, as that is the only way that galleries and museums see my art. This is also the only way that I can present myself to juries.
My approach to eroticism has been as an illustrator—initially of corporeal reality and then of less tangible, abstract concepts. In the first few years after starting in 1997, I simply captured the human form. This satisfied my own juvenile, voyeuristic curiosity and that of my audience. The stereoscopic nature of the images, of the viewing method or devices, lent itself perfectly to this purpose: the voyeur craves intimacy, detail and realism—proximity to the subject—and the stereoscope provides these qualities. More recently, I’ve explored abstract concepts: depicting the physical sensations of erotic touch, or the cerebral erotic memory, desire or fantasy. Stereoscopic images facilitate the transmission of such conceptualizations. Thus, I am fortunate to be working in a medium that can keep up with my artistic interests and musings.
Now I am pursuing projects that are more interactive. I play with the expectations of my audience. When one is near a stereoscope, the image within is not evident to bystanders. Only when one is sufficiently curious and summons the courage to look into the ‘scope, is the image revealed. Bystanders wonder: what is he seeing? The experience draws attention back to us, as viewers. We become self-conscious again.
Universal equations govern our behavior: balancing risks versus rewards, fear vs. desire. This is evident not just in the viewing of erotic art, but certainly also in the making and exhibition of it. Models deal with the fear of exposure—firstly in the studio, secondly upon publication—but may come to revel in their exhibitionism, to experience liberation from external cultural strictures. The artist must also overcome fear as he similarly exposes himself—his erotic self—during the making of the art and upon publication. Thus, the relationship between the erotic artist and his models is necessarily intimate. Both share an experience of risk and reward.
Within the privileged and enclosed world of the stereoscope, the audience experiences this conjunction of intimacy and exhibition and the tension between apprehension and pleasure.
