Exhibitions
TYLER SHIELDS
Tinney Contemporary / 237 5th Ave. N. October 5, 2019 - November 29, 2019
Tyler Shields
Tinney Contemporary is pleased to present TYLER SHIELDS, an exhibition showcasing the provocative works of renowned fashion and celebrity photographer Tyler Shields.
Tyler Shields has been dubbed “Hollywood’s favorite photographer” for his work with celebrities, but more impressive than his star-studded cast are the narrative yarns he spins in every image. His photographs contain equal parts glamor and violence, seemingly pulling you in as they push you away. Shields pairs signifiers of wealth, power, violence, beauty and the grotesque to create fantasies containing the contradictions of modern life. Featured in Shields’ photographs are movie stars, models, guns, cars, high fashion brands, and a Tarantino-esque use of blood.
The tools of visual representation have been dispersed to the masses to create a new media produced and consumed by the same actors, digitally perfected, modified, shared, accelerated, accessed by multitudes in an instant, lost in the wake of the next thing, rediscovered, recycled, remixed and memed, all in a breath. This is Tyler Shields’ playground.
Shields’ work easily traverses this image-object wasteland, in which ever-shortening attention spans crave newness and shock. Shields delivers on both of these fronts with sensational images which place their subject within a larger fantasy, fueled by sensuality and special effects. His work cuts through a mass media-driven economy of images by engaging with the most visually represented echelon of culture—celebrity—and blowing up the traditional image making process. In so doing, Shields blurs the line between art and editorial, drawing attention to the image itself rather than relying on the subject’s star power—be it Tony Hawk, Lindsay Lohan, or an Hermes bag. His work is in dialogue with a long tradition of fashion photographers interested in blurring this boundary.
Shields lives and works in LA. His photographs have been exhibited internationally.
