Webber Gallery presents Bachelor Suite, the newest collection by Los Angeles-based photographer Peter Tomka. By a mixture of authentic and located pictures, Tomka explores themes of loss, reconstruction and queer identification, making a fragmented but deeply private narrative.
Tomka’s course of entails cropping and repurposing 1000’s of pictures – each his personal and researched imagery – to construct layered compositions. These digital negatives are inverted, enlarged and projected onto light-sensitive paper by way of a makeshift glory gap, now symbolically reduce by way of a mattress. This system ties into his ongoing exploration of queer areas, goals and eroticism, echoing his earlier challenge, Watering Gap.
Set in Tomka’s condo in Koreatown’s historic Gaylord Residences, Bachelor Suite blurs personal and public spheres, drawing from Hollywood noir aesthetics, notably the movie The Black Angel. The segmented, four-part prints resemble crime scene flash pictures, reinforcing Tomka’s ongoing engagement with surveillance and voyeurism – central to his earlier challenge, Studio Encore.
Bachelor Suite is now on view at Webber Gallery till February 29.
Webber Gallery
18 Newman St, London
W1T 1PE, United Kingdom
