Come celebrate the release of Walt Cessna's 2nd photography book
WOLFPACK! Photographs by Walt Cessna Art direction by Frank Gargiulo
BOOK RELEASE EVENT // Fri Feb 17 / 8pm
Performance // Chad Ferro
Music // DJ Sheba Legend
EARLY VIEWING // 5-8pm
EXHIBITION ON VIEW // through Feb 19 / Sat-Sun 1-6pm
SPLATTERPOOL artspace
138 Bayard St. Brooklyn 11222
Take L train to Graham
www.splatterpool.com
WOLFPACK! Limited Edition 200 pg full color soft cover 8 X 10 photography book art directed by Frank Gargiulo & WOLFPACK! 2012 Calendar art directed by George William Widmer. 140 dudes. 1 Lady Rizo. DJ Sheba Legend. Bad Boy of burlesque Chad Ferro. I will be showing 200 5 X 7 portraits. 10 first edition copies of book & calendar signed with choice of 1 print from show. A very special 30 X 46 hand painted print collaboration with Scooter LaForge / CESSNA HEARTS LAFORGE.
WOLFPACK! logo by Frank Gargiulo
WALT CESSNA / WOLFPACK! by PAUL DARLING A heady mix of the erotic, the sublime and the seemingly everyday, Walt’s new work, WOLFPACK!, sees him share the most intimate of moments with an eclectic array of model subjects and translate these experiences into photographs that both shock and seduce the senses. Like a shorn and inked Pied Piper with a camera and a creative hard-on, Walt leads us through the pulsating roar of the city, the throb and hum of the candy neon-spilled streets, the clang of strangers shifting in stairwells and into the silent sanctuary of the lover’s bedroom where we’re aware that anything can happen. And it does. Walt is a visual junkie; an aesthetic magpie who artfully plunders the realms of photo-journalism, fashion photography, pornography and conventional portraiture to serve, time and time again, image after image that feeds his desire to show us how he sees the world. Shot over 2 years, WOLFPACK! is Walt’s second book of photography. The first, FUKT 2 START WIT, also the name of his first solo New York show, was published to great acclaim in 2010, noted by the public and critics alike for its collection of unique and visually innovative portraits. With WOLFPACK! he continues to explore the themes of reflection, eroticism, isolation, alternative ideas of machismo, queer culture and beauty through portraits that inspire awe, introspection and lust in equal measure. Born in Flushing, Queens, Walt embarked on his notorious career in fashion at the crazy tender age of 13 (Mozart may have been composing at 5 years old, but he wasn’t dealing with the complexities of fabric and form), and went on to become a fashion editor, writer, stylist, magazine publisher, designer, agent and of course, a photographer. Throughout his fashion career, many who swam in Walt’s pond went on to become very big fish indeed, due in no small part to his gift for aesthetics. It is this education - at the heart of the fashion world, running around with the clubutantes of the 90’s and beyond, discovering and styling the glitterati, pulling all-nighters to make deadlines and being at the forefront of what was new and hot and now – that has shaped Walt’s vision. He no longer needs to prove that he’s the kid who knows all there is to know about fashion and style….he is so beyond that it ain’t even funny. Style without substance is no longer enough for him – his work goes much deeper than that. In fact it was in 2005, after a four year break from creating art and an ensuing orgy of hedonistic self-destruction San Francisco, that he once again decided to pick up a camera and yet realized that he no longer wanted to do fashion photography. He needed to move BEYOND fashion – to look at people not clothes, the intimate not the ostentatious, the inside not the outside.
