37 Main Street
Narrowsburg, NY 12764
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Alliance Gallery Director: Michael "Rocky" Pinciotti
(845) 252-7576




Photographs of bodybuilders by Brian Moss will be featured in the exhibition titled “Body.Built,” opening with a reception on Friday, July 29 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Alliance Gallery at the Delaware Arts Center in Narrowsburg, NY. The exhibit will be on view through August 20, 2011.
 
Moss, himself a product of the bodybuilding scene, having founded the gym chain Better Bodies in New York in 1982, documents the journey from gym to hotel room to pump-up room to stage as the ultimate insider.
 
“My images are unguarded, honest, and voyeuristic,” says Moss who started photographing leading competitors in the bodybuilding world in 1997. “Whether they capture backstage scenes at a bodybuilding contest or training in the gym, these images are imbued with an intimacy that has never been seen before.”
 
The reality Moss captures is unlike that of other sports and other athletes, where pre-game rituals seek to channel nervous energy into focus, and post-game reactions are euphoria at winning or disgust at losing. Food-deprived bodybuilders are tired before a show and exhausted after it. Win or lose, they’re well aware of their Sisyphean task: The first thing they’ll do after dieting down for the show is eat, thereby beginning the process of destroying the pristine condition they’ve just spent three months achieving.
 
The photos of these athletes that appear in magazines are obsessed with clarity and detail, but backstage the bodybuilders sit recessed in shadows, their faces smeared with grease, giving the appearance of war paint. Moss’s photographs shine a light on those shadows, and the athletes inhabiting them, for the first time.

This exhibit, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, the Arts Council for Sullivan County, NY, and is made possible in part with funding from the Visual Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Alliance Gallery is located at the Delaware Arts Center at 37 Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information about the exhibit call (845) 252-7576.


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Alliance Gallery Exhibition Archive

Kathy Grady "Stratum" July 1 to 23, 2011

Peaceable Kingdom, Loft Gallery Group Show, July 1 to 23, 2011

Charles Wilkin "Days Are Numbered" June 3 to 25, 2011