STARS is pleased to announce Clifford Prince King: RASPBERRY BLOW, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, July 9, 7-9 pm. Where are the boundaries? In this suite of photographs from Clifford Prince King, they are everywhere and nowhere, blurred just so. Or they are exactly there, along the seam where two frames are stitched together or doubled up. Under such pressure, content is subsumed by context, and vice-versa. In Diary of a Diagnosis, 2018, the artist strikes a dancerly pose while holding toward the lens a curtain of lace. It hides nothing that wasn’t already hidden by the blur. It is ornament become subject, announcing a depthless zone in which there is no inside, no outside, only permeable perimeter. The titillating, nerve-wracking, deeply affecting result of such moves is to invite us into an intimate encounter, or a happenstance scene, without quite giving us access—a man buttons up his jeans, a Paris subway station splits in two, and even as we partake of the fleeting moment, we know how equivocal its existence always was. RASPBERRY BLOW draws from seven years of his work, underlining the range of gestures with which he has reanimated the documentary-style image. AIDS-era photographers put a ragged kind of snapshot realism to radical ends; King subverts the idiom with a dreamy, narrative sensibility, rooting his work in the place where politics becomes psychological. Meanwhile, with his exclusive use of film, and his proclivity for antique, large-format cameras, the self-taught King invokes the tinkerers who pioneered the medium, perhaps especially the Pictorialists of the late 19th century. For them, the evocation of atmosphere took precedence over the description of subject matter, and like King they often experimented with composites and multiple exposures. The goal was not to launch the work into surreality, but to inflect reality with a skepticism that might make it credible. #CliffordPrinceKing #StarsGallery