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The photographs of Peter Baker, Hrvoje Slovenc, and Mónika Sziládi picture random intimacies or staged encounters among objects and bodies in the dystopian topographies and shifting scales of places we live. Their pictures cross between public and private spaces, move from streets to rooms, feature small groups, couples, lone figures, and empty spaces. The work reflects on the cities and suburban interiors of the early 21st century that are marked by experiences of dislocation, information overload and by the often disaffected social exchanges we live by.
Peter Baker's pictures take us in the city where snippets of greenery in midtown New York and downtown Los Angeles appear to be as fake as Astroturf and streets become stages where people stumble upon each other, forming haphazard, momentary, and disjointed relations. By defying traditions of street photography, he confronts us with the sanitized anonymity of office buildings and nonplaces to challenge the mythological identity of New York as a space of a one-of-a-kind urbanity. The smoking figure in his Untitled speaks to ordinary exclusions that govern communal spaces and confound boundaries of private and public. As the random adjacency of bodies in Men, Baseball, New York, where not only bodies but perceptions of movement and stasis also interact, Baker's straight photographs induce ambiguous sensations of claustrophobia and agoraphobia and address issues of social anxiety and public space.
Hrvoje Slovenc's triptychs present multilayered textures and surfaces of interior spaces and objects. Untitled IV (Tea Party), a photograph from his Home Theater series, shows a space of a private ritual where the lacerated flesh of a naked man becomes a disquieting ornament of the decoration. While the pictures of Home Theater stage disjointed scenes of unnerving domesticity with a sensual cruelty, Slovenc's portrait series Partners in Crime turns acts of self-fashioning into another kind of home theater where the presumed in