Polly Borland

Nino Mier Gallery’s new show Nudie is a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Polly Borland presented in the newly inaugurated Gallery 3.

For the solo exhibition “Nudie” Australian photographer Polly Borland has, after a long career, turned the lens on herself for the very first time. Using an iPhone camera, she challenges ‘selfie’ tropes and social media culture of self-worship and self-image through contorted, grotesque oversized nudes. These confrontational photographic prints amplify her aging body with tightly cropped frames that seem sculptural and surreal in their abstraction. The artist twists, kneads, flips and folds her body, handling her flesh like a malleable material while also steering her iPhone camera with a selfie stick. Borland is widely known for her portraits of prominent cultural figures and conversely, underground communities, like her investigations of infantilist fetishists in the 1990s. Taking and now unveiling these immensely personal self-portraits exposes the artist to the same vulnerability she notoriously and miraculously elicited out of her past portrait subjects.