Pressing Against Looking investigates questions of “looking,” how the practice and politics of looking is a form of “pressure” – instrumental in the formation of self and Other, as well as how a viewer may perceive difference.  Pressing Against Looking is an ongoing conceptual and material inquiry activated by Gina Osterloh through photographs, performance, and steel plate text works, Pressing Against Looking emotively addresses both the mental formation of an image in tandem with the physical and conceptual legibility of skin. 

The photographs mark Gina Osterloh’s return to incorporating her own body, performing for the camera, activating large scale monochrome paper room environments. In the photographs, long poles press against the artist’s eyes, and in a portrait titled "Obliterate," the artist appears facing forward in classical Rembrandt lighting, her skin masked in black tape– amplifying notions of pressure, and the pleasure and pain of looking, through formal and performative elements.  The photographs directly activate the physical and psychological sites of the eyes and face, as zones holding a tremendous amount of pressure– the conceptual pressure of the self being compressed into the photographic frame– which in turn is a site of cultural pressure– as the act of looking presses a body into a paradigm of social constructs such as race and gender.

A quote from Phoebe Chen's essay in Aperture Magazine 2023, "This, she reminds me, is what photography does: it flattens, captures, regulates—but also protects, preserves. What riper medium is there for exploring such perceptual borderlands, when the very act of framing is also a kind of touch, a means of pushing subjects and forms into one another and seeing what they can withstand? The photographs in Pressing Against Looking (2019) are perhaps the keenest expression of this approach: Osterloh’s figure, sitting fully frontal, bars her vision with a long pole in each hand, two stark vectors slicing up the frame. Eyes pressed against their blunt heft, she thwarts her own vision along with the viewer’s, denying us the intimacy of seeing her seeing. The camera and its frame might press her into a structure of visibility, but she, too, presses, against its gaze and our insistence on making her legible."

Support for Pressing Against Looking and other works for Osterloh's solo exhibition at Higher Pictures Generation was made possible by generous support from The Women's Place, Critical Difference for Women Grant from The Ohio State University. Photo documentation of framed work by Dario Lasagni, New York.