Alexandra Gibson's solo photography exhibit "For Consumption Only" opens at Skotia Gallery
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Tuesday, September 23, 2025


Alexandra Gibson's solo photography exhibit "For Consumption Only" opens at Skotia Gallery
Soul Anoymous, 30x40 inches, inkjet archival paper.



CULVER CITY, CA.- On Saturday, August 4th, Los Angeles native Alexandra Gibson unveiled a closely guarded and provocative new series of photographs that has been in the making since 2008. For Consumption Only is an emotional, visceral, and confrontational display of the flesh, both dead and alive, in close interaction with each other and with the viewer in a dance of the divine and the macabre.

Artist's Statement
A year after my mother unexpectedly died, I travelled with my mentor, photography legend Mary Ellen Mark­, into the hidden districts of Oaxaca, Mexico. I crossed over into the corners of a city that even locals have difficulty navigating. Yearning to literally face death with my art, and consumed by my mother’s sudden passing, I found myself compelled to photograph a local slaughterhouse. To visually capture the full severity of life and death.

The first series of shoots in the slaughterhouse, which happened in 2008, was an uncompromising examination of process and product. After almost a decade of shooting fine art erotica, my fascination with the slaughterhouse merged into my fascination with the human body. It was impossible for me to ignore this fact: the texture of pig is so similar to the texture of human.

So my initial compulsion to photograph the slaughterhouse production process quickly developed into an opportunity for powerful emotional interaction. It became a project that reached far beyond the journalistic scope of an essay on the production of meat; the series evolved into a discussion and a meditation on the fears, disgusts, and cultural barriers that surround the raw elements of death, and the tender vulnerability of the body’s life.

"For Consumption Only" aims to reinvent an often-dehumanized industry of flesh, fur, and bone. It offers confession to the basic terror of existence, and it requires all who participate, all who see it, to undress their own perceptions of survival and expiration.

Described as “sometimes bizarre, sometimes beautiful – but always layered with deep psychological undertones” by Mary Ellen Mark, this series sets out to depict the dualities of mortality, without apology and regardless of taboo. Since the beginning of production, I was granted complete access by the slaughterhouse to investigate and shoot what I saw and heard. To unveil the layers of dialogue, curiosity and confusion embedded in the rhythms of life and death. In 2011, three years after my first shoot and still very much involved in the project, I returned to Oaxaca to take the work step further.

At the second installation of shoots, I spent ten days photographing nudes inside the slaughterhouse. Nudes with the pigs and the skins. With the drying hooks and the dark, stained walls. And in keeping with the project’s intention to reconcile with my own experiences of death, I stepped out from behind the camera, joined the tribe of models, and offered my own nude body to some of the photographs.

Ten days is a long time to be in a slaughterhouse. Day after day after day we listened to the unmistakable and unforgettable sounds of dying. We studied the rhythms of slaughterhouse workers for whom this relationship with death is diurnal. One day the local crew whistled at us from beyond the brick wall. They couldn’t see us, but they knew what we were doing: willingly drifting into a graveyard, still fresh with blood while fully nude and vulnerable.

The intent for the second shoot was to create a collision: this rarely revealed environment filled with death and execution interacting with the living, sensual, and strongly emotional human. The flesh for consumption with the flesh of the consumer. With "For Consumption Only" I am exploring and exposing the most fundamental verities of our existence, and showing what in our deepest bones we all know.

There is beauty in death.










Today's News

August 5, 2012

Nohra Haime Gallery provides intimate look into Niki de Saint Phalle's work in new exhibition

Exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art showcases 80 rarely-seen prints and drawings

Chuck Ramirez photograph acquired by Smithsonian American Art Museum for permanent collection

Spain's cultural treasures on exclusive U.S. tour from the Prado, Madrid, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Beautiful Concertina book illustrates history of flight and aviation in one extravagantly long panorama

Rijksmuseum acquires unique sculpture of screaming child by Hendrick de Keyser

Cig Harvey's "You Look At Me Like An Emergency" at Mpls Photo Center in Minneapolis

The glorious 12th celebrated with the best of English and Scottish sporting guns & rifles

Peterson Field Guide photos coming to New York City's Guernsey's Auctioneers

Antiques dealer pleads guilty to illegal trafficking of endangered rhinoceros horns

Bonhams to sell important collection of Maseratis at Goodwood Revival Sale in September

Fredrik Lindqvist mixes humour with dead seriousness at Galleri Lars Olsen in Copenhagen

Important exhibit of Marilyn Monroe paintings presented by Galleria Ca'd'oro Miami

New featured acquisition: The Racine Art Museum debuts Cristina Cordova's sculpture

Orit Akta Hildesheim, recipient of the Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art, exhibits at Tel Aviv Museum

Alexandra Gibson's solo photography exhibit "For Consumption Only" opens at Skotia Gallery

WW Solo Award shortlist announced, Group 2012: an exhibition of 37 shortlisted artists

Harry Truman grandson visits Hiroshima A-bomb memorial

Minnesota bridge collapse artifacts stay out of sight

Patriots Point selected as site of National Medal of Honor Museum




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 




Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)


Editor: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful