TOUCH ME

November 12 - 26, 2022

Fokianou Art Space

Athens, Greece

Essay by Jonathan Goodman

Artist Susan Daboll grew up in Connecticut in a rural environment. After studying art at Syracuse University, Daboll moved to New York City, where she got a master’s degree in photography from New York University and taught there as well. Moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she opened a lab, and started making sexually charged images of the female figure, which were included in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1998. After a trip to Greece the same year, she married and established a home on the island of Paros, where she currently resides.

Daboll’s show, called “Touch Me,” consists of three groups of images: fireworks, bodies, and landscapes. For some time, Daboll has engaged with the notion of sensuality—not only that of human sexuality, but also in visually seductive motifs in the physical environment. Even fireworks, islands, and the sea can be seen as evidence of the erotic. Daboll is very much a historian of alluring form, which she parlays into imagery of compelling design. Her point of view, personal and slightly mysterious, transforms the ordinary into something else.

In Touch Me I (all works were made in 2022), shadows prevail. This work is a composite of three photos. On the left, a row of armchairs is seen, their backs against a wall. The scene is submerged in a dark, slightly pinkish light, with the tops of the armrests picking up that light. The middle image shows a building at night with a lit window; a beautiful double sphere of fireworks consisting of single rods of light fills the upper register. The right picture depicts a hall with an arched entrance and brown floor, extending to a multi-windowed door revealing only darkness. That space is filled with a pink light. The work is a complex amalgam of imagery, taken from a series that refers indirectly and not so indirectly to erotic experience.

In Touch Me V, The body is that of a man. The vertical diptych continues Daboll’s interest in the obliquely amorous, for years in consideration. In this image, we see a vertical diptych. Each of the two images is of a naked man resting sideways on rumpled white sheets. In the top image, the man lies with his back turned toward us. His face is not visible; we simply see a mass of brown hair. A hand is cupped underneath the figure’s arm. The sheet behind him is severely disheveled and mimics the shape of the man’s body. The second image, underneath, is very similar; the man and bed are the same. But here the body is positioned upward (we don’t see the head), rather than head down, as in the photo above it. But like the work at the top, below there is a hand gripping the side of the man’s body, and the legs once again are bent. A tousled sheet follows the person’s body closely.

Is this the same image as the first, overturned? It is hard to say. Daboll’s eroticism here, and generally in her work, is subtle and suggestive rather than overtly sexual. When she first began working with sensuous imagery, she was investigating the disjunction between her own notion of the erotic with a culturally derived notion of the same. Her work was part of the spirit of the time, in which women were exploring erotic feeling. Daboll took part in a movement that was just beginning, but which demonstrated considerable exploratory force. Now such images are much more common; they remain compelling in their depiction of desire. In these photos, Daboll’s evidence of attraction is striking; the work communicates the atmosphere and circumstances of erotic feeling, enhanced by implication.

This writer particularly enjoyed the landscape imagery. Touch Me VIII consists of nine black-and-white photographs, more or less alike; each consists of a gray body of water, with an island extending from the upper right to the left, and a complicated gray and white sky. The three images that form the vertical middle row each have a pole in the foreground. In the bottom two works of this group, the pole divides the image and makes it more complex. In the top work, the pole occurs so far to the left, we can only see it partially, and there is no sense of division. Knowing that Daboll spends much time in Greece, we assume these images come from the Aegean Sea.. They are wonderfully romantic and deliberately beautiful in ways we don’t see much anymore. Perhaps that is Daboll’s strength as a photographic artist; she unabashedly conveys feeling—in her interior work, in her exterior work, in her sensual portraits. When a strong formal intelligence is joined to an equally forceful emotional life in art, the results are both meaningful and striking. These photos resonate deeply in the viewer’s imagination.

Jonathan Goodman