Many worlds and dreams I’ve traveled Sliding softly through the night Scanned through silicones and cycles Mirrored low your emerald life – Billy Joe Shaver

Maccarone is proud to present, America is my Woman, Oscar Tuazon’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Akin to Tuazon’s past interventions that have called into questions existing traditions and offered plausible alternatives, in this series of photographic-based works the artist distorts image content via industrial methods to the point where subject-matter becomes arbitrary – at best vague, highlighting the overall difficulty with the notion and ideality of perception.

Collapsing and penetrating one medium via another, Tuazon inflicts his prints mounted to aluminum with bends, distortions and punctures, thereby desacralizing the photograph. Traces of fingerprints remain on their surfaces, ghosts of the artist’s hand guiding the objects through these machines. The aesthetics of the crumpling reveals an aggression toward the image’s insufficiency– its inability to ever truly present the subjective state, what one could deem photography’s failure to capture the soul. Via objects both freestanding and affixed to the gallery walls, Tuazon negates the image yet hovers on a plane of action that still longs for the auratic moment an image can supposedly provide, the result evoking a psychic state of fear, anxiety, discomfort, and the ever-present unknown.

Oscar Tuazon (b. 1975, Seattle, Washington) lives and works in Paris. He received his education from Cooper Union School of Art and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. Tuazon’s works have most recently been seen in “ILLUMInations – the 54th International Art Exhibition” in Venice as well as “The Language of Less (Then and Now)” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, now on view. Recent solo exhibitions include: Standard Gallery, Oslo (2011); The Power Station, Dallas (2011); ICA, London; Kunsthalle Bern (2010); Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010); Maccarone (2008); Seattle Art Museum (2008); and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich (2011); Wiels Center for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2010); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Musee d’art modern de la Ville de Paris; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo (Marco), Vigo (2009).