A nylon grocery bag emblazoned with the face of Barack Obama sits on a curb, its fabric folds distorting the former President into a leering caricature of pre-2016 neo-liberal glee. In another photo a burst of flash grazes the surface of a white bedspread, illuminating the novel resting atop it: “Ordinary People.” Its title emblazoned in bold, black text like an isolated affidavit of “business-as-usual” normalcy.
The book’s eponymous screenplay is the source material for the title When I Let Myself Feel, All I Feel Is Lousy, and like Ordinary People, simmering beneath the surface of Doran Walot’s photographs of Middle America is a looming emotional subtext that neglects articulation.
Walot’s formalist exercises in line, shape, and composition wed the disparate images of When I Let Myself Feel into a cohesive, and at times surprising, body of work. But it is its provocative, dissociative distance from subject that keeps you turning the page. An atmosphere of repression, alienation, or perhaps desire is at play in this body of work by an artist whose practice reimagines vernacular image-objects as memorials for quotidian queer experiences.
