Mary Katharine Tramontana | 'Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing' book launch & photography exhibition

In the organizer's words:

Serious Pleasures

Book launch, reading, exhibition opening: December 7, 2024, 6:30PM

Artist talk: December 14, 2024, 7PM

Finissage: January 8, 2025, 7PM

Duration: December 7, 2024 - January 8, 2025

Location: JERGON, Wrangelstraße 76 - 10997

Please join us for the limited edition art book launch of Mary Katharine Tramontana's Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing with a month-long solo exhibition of accompanying photography, reading, and artist talk at JERGON.

"In Mary Katharine Tramontana's Serious Pleasures, poetry is hyper-explicit-both sensual and intellectual-and in that sense closest to Pasolini's destruction and reaffirmation of poetic sublimation. Her poetics of submission give the reader the option of subjecthood in either position." -Toni Hildebrant, co-editor of PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher

Against the backdrop of a new era of sexual regression across the political spectrum, Mary Katharine Tramontana's poetry and photography are a reminder that sex is a fundamental way of being human. Her corporeal self-portraits and selected work from her ongoing photography series of young bisexual men, Boys, offers a new, queer perspective to art history's legacy of the male artist desiring the female body.

"I wanted to create a body of work purely for my gratification," Tramontana said. "I intentionally objectify my male subjects in a power play that excites us both (they like that I am fully clothed while they're in a state of undress), but I refer to them as my subjects. The process of our shared spontaneous attention in this moment of social media commodification-Simone Weil said 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'-is just as vital to me as the portrait, which is really a document of our ephemeral encounter."

Book launch Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing

Reading and opening exhibition of photography

6:30PM Saturday December 7, 2024

Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing is writer (New York Times, Esquire) and photographer Mary Katharine Tramontana's debut limited edition collection of poetry with original photography. The collection began as a letter she wrote in the South of France to seduce an incapacitating on-again off-again lover-a glamorous and mysterious Milanese neighbor. Drinks and music.

Artist talk: "Poetics of Submission: Desire, Longing, and Eroticism"

7PM Saturday December 14

Desire can give us energy to change our lives, or it can incapacitate us. It can get us closer to ourselves, or it can obliterate our sense of self. Writer and photographer Mary Katharine Tramontana will be in conversation with critic and JERGON director, Nicola Patruno, in a discussion of her photography and her book, Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing. Cocktails and music.

About the artist

Mary Katharine Tramontana (b. 1982) is a photographer, poet, and writer whose work on sexual politics and art has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She's collaborated with Reina Sofía, the Spanish Film Archive, WILZIG Museum, silent green, Arsenal Institute, Academy of Arts Berlin, and Technical University Berlin. In the past year, she has exhibited internationally in six shows in Miami, Berlin, and Savannah, and given multiple talks on sexuality, culture, and gender. The recipient of a Frieze arts writing bursary, she has worked as a sex research assistant at Kinsey Institute. This spring, she'll be in residence at Villa Lena to write her first non-fiction book, LUST: Porn, Power, Pleasure, co-written with Erika Lust and published in the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Catalonia, and Germany. She lives in Berlin.

For interviews and further information, please contact: contact@jergon.studio.

Art Rabbit:

https://www.artrabbit.com/events/mary-katharine-tramontana-serious-pleasures-poems-of-lust-and-longing-book-launch-photography