Kim Reierson's images in "Body Presenters" are at once as intensely private as personal sensory and brashly public as an aesthetic immortalization. Bodybuilding is alternately referred to by its practitioners and admirers as both an art and sport, and Reierson's camera works to convey a similarly duplicitous take— roaming backstage among the icons, she captures details of their collective camaraderie and untiring self-address, in turn revealing the spirit of competition and simultaneous artistic illusions.

 

Icon Arnold Schwarzenegger made Pumping Iron popular in the 70’s, long before highly commercialized bodybuilding.  Business impresario Florenz Ziegfeld brought Eugen Sandow, the father of bodybuilding, to the 1891 Chicago Columbia Exposition. Presented as a traditional carnival strongman at first, Ziegfeld soon discovered that audiences were more interested in Sandow's physique, so his feats of strength were replaced by a series of muscular posing sessions. Sandow made a conscious effort to sculpt his body to fit the proportions of ancient Greek sculptures. This illusion of a living statue, an idealization of human form that has come to life, remains at the heart of bodybuilding.

 

Reierson, in homage to the emerging Fin de Siecle roots of bodybuilding, has chosen to present the works of this exhibition in glass-domed frames dating from 1870 to 1920. These selected frames she sought after and compiled are a piece of American history, having once encased diverse images from our nation's past.

 

Issues of historical aesthetics become compounded by gender contradictions when turning to Reierson's photographs of women. In a world where fashion has presented an ideal of femininity for decades as little more than a bone thin coat hanger, these female body builders and exotic dancers unabashedly display strong, defined, substantial muscle.  Persistent in this cosmopolitan is the atmosphere of the catwalk, makeup, hair styling and all the vanity of self-address found in any woman's mirror. 

 

Like that mirror, Reierson’s adeptness uses the camera in a way that focuses honestly on the subject's intimate moments, in combined acknowledgment that these backstage preparations are theatrical gestures. Implicit in this are the desires of the audience and the subject alike fused together in a redefinition of the self. Besides the body's inherent eroticism, an incongruous affinity and disconcertion are provoked by the elements in these photos; plastic sheeting, raw light bulbs, curling irons, baby oil and rhinestones sparkle in original moments of composition. Our address in viewing these works ranges broadly.  Elements of contemporary glamour coexist with a well worn arsenal of back street stagecraft, provoking the dyad of pleasure and discomfort that ultimately lies in all presentations of body image, whether the traditional world of beauty, or in its alternative presented here.