October 10 to November 10, 2003

"Ugly, stupid, gross, and ridiculous. The nastier, the better," was Everest Hall's stringent criteria for the images sourced in "I am looking for someone lonely like me…" From a man's crotch styled to resemble Joe Camel, to a woman proudly displaying her freakishly long pubic hair, to a retarded man dressed as a cardboard Transformer, Everest is obsessed with the world of self-published and downloadable marginalia. Spending most of his time at the crossroads of pathos and revelry, Everest's years of surfing web porn has led to a community of sites devoted to base and juvenile humor, a land where, "the world is made into one big dick joke." He blatantly worships the disgusting and the abject with his brush and pencil. Fetishisticly and lovingly rendering his subjects with virtuosic technical skill. The lowly frat house snap shot of a drunk boy pissing on the White House lawn is elevated via the tender and reverential act of rendering. A self-styled genital tableau is immortalized and recontextualized within the world of fine art. Radical forms of self-expression attract Everest because they make manifest the essential human need to communicate visually. These candid images are compelling because they do not present people from an intentional point of view, instead, they are extraordinarily ordinary. They are filtered out of the dominant culture and are posted, perhaps with a touch of cruelty or black humor, in the temporary and ever-changing realm of cyber-space, where sites devoted to toilet bowls full of shit are but a click away.

Everest Hall holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale School of Art. He lives and works in New York City.

.