PAPERMAG: iO Tillet Wright's <em>Breedings</em> Closes This Weekend

Since her birth in a yellow cab some 20 odd years ago, self-taught photographer iO Tillett Wright has lived many lives -- from her days acting in theater and film (with Steve Buscemi in Trees Lounge among other things) her five-year run as founder and editor-in-chief of international street art mag Overspray (which the author proudly co-published), to her current incarnation as independent art curator and "Notes from the Underground" columnist for T Magazine online. It's no surprise after years spent pushing the work of others that she's now turned her attention and efforts to cultivating her own talent within the fine-art world.

After being asked to be the only photographer included in The Hole's inaugural show and following a spread in VICE Magazine's "Still Lifes" issue, she's now hung her first solo show. Breedings, up at Fuse Gallery, consists of sets of paired black and white 35 mm photographs that have been "getting it on" -- she has paired all of the images, because they are somehow "drawn to each another," so that they ultimately create new stories separate from those of the individual images. Since September 18th, her subject's moments of quiet solitude, captured usually without their knowledge ("I hate 'photo face'" says iO) and while surrounded by a crowd, has set an introspective tone to the gallery behind the very rowdy Lit Lounge. A very suitable setting indeed for the "fleeting points of vulnerability and isolation, cracks in the celebratory facade that counter the contrived yet conventional nature of party photography."

Be sure to spend your own solitary moment with these images before the exhibit closes this Saturday, Oct. 16. More of her work can be seen online at www.darlingdays.com.