LUKE SMALLEY GEB: Exercise at Home - Tapa dura

In his second book, Luke Smalley revisits the themes and ideas that resonated throughout his 2002 monograph "Gymnasium". Smalley returns to his native Pennsyvania to investigate the small-town interiors and landscapes which are the settings for his portraits of young atheletes. Color photographs, inspired by a more innocent era, depict exercises which combine whimsy with the inexplicable: Smalley has hired a local seamstress to construct a colassal medicine ball: he binds two boys together with a harness and leaves them in an empty room for a game of tug-of-war, while somewhere nearby two boys lead donkeys around the floor of a basketball court in an empty high school gym. Scale, time and content are altered to create the world Smalley inhabits: the lush colors of this new world belie the viewer's sense of dislocation.