envoy enterprises is pleased to present Food Chain, an exhibition of new work by New York-based Russian artist Slava Mogutin, on view from 24 September through 1 November 2009.

Slava Mogutin’s first solo show at envoy enterprises, and his first major New York exhibition in over 5 years, brings together a series of highly stylized, iconographic portraits, blending the boldness and honesty of police mug shots with the fantasy and desire of vintage pornography.

Showing slightly different angles of each scene in the format of triptychs and diptychs, Mogutin uses his camera as a voyeuristic tool to explore the character and emotion of his subjects, while simultaneously exposing their insecurities and vulnerabilities. It is an obsessive exercise aimed at breaking the barriers between the photographer and the photographed, the voyeur and the exhibitionist, the projected persona and the actual person.

Continuing his investigation of male desire, fetishistic obsessions, and the poetics of the obscene, most of the photos in the exhibition were shot in Germany during the filming of Food Chain.

A non-narrative, experimental feature movie, Food Chain was commissioned by the Berlin-based porn company Cazzo Film. The project, which was directed by Mogutin in the summer of 2006, never saw the light of day because the producers folded it due to its violent and “unmarketable” content.

To accompany the work in Food Chain, a multi-channel video installation of unedited video clips shot in Berlin in the summer of 2007 and featuring Marko Brozic, a young Slovenian artist and one of Mogutin’s favorite subjects, is the last piece of a lost puzzle.

Slava Mogutin was born in Kemerovo, Siberia, and exiled from Russia for his queer writings and activism at the age of 21. In 1995, he was granted political asylum in the US with the support of Amnesty International and PEN American Center. He is the author of two hardcover monographs of photography, Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go, and seven books of writings published in Russian. In the past decade, Mogutin’s photography and multimedia work has been exhibited internationally, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, The Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) in Spain.