Selected Press
Momus
Querying the New Appropriation Art: Is this Cynicism?
by Joseph Henry
Fader, who’s present at the gallery most days to assist with the auto-portraiture, enacts the sharing and caring of the exhibition’s title: the optimistic desires of his original performance, based admittedly on a quirky kind of eroticism, necessarily requires its distribution online and on the gallery wall (a counterpoint here is the more enclosed intimacy of the late Adrian Howells’s work). I’m not sure the hashtag is an instrument of collective authorship, as much as it is currency for a corporate-minded smart-phone app. But in topping up Prince’s own appropriation of the performance, Fader shapes a dialogue on display value and contemporary strategies of (self)-promotion. His connections between the sentimentality of the wish, the attention of the hashtag, and the creativity of the artist are fertile in their implications, if perhaps naïve in their politics.
Hyperallergic
A Young Artist Debuts at Gagosian, Thanks to Richard Prince
by Benjamin Sutton
Instead of dwelling on the way that Prince’s work emptied his participatory social media project of all its meaning and context, Fader engineered an appropriation of his own, sending out a press release inviting the public to see his work at Gagosian “in an exhibition organized by Richard Price.” The incident has been instructive, helping him to focus his practice and his interests.
Behold at Slate.com
Fantasy Versus Reality in the Online Dating World
By David Rosenberg
Signing up on 16 online dating sites and going out on 100 dates in a year might not be something you’d talk to your mother about, but it does provide fodder for an interesting photography project. Sean Fader did exactly that beginning in January 2010 and suddenly found himself enmeshed in a project in which he felt like an “emotional train wreck.
Art F City
Sean Fader’s SUP?: High on Style, Low on Substance
by Marc Boucai
And where is Sean Fader the artist in “’SUP?” Although he never appears in any of the photos, he is omnipresent. Without even seeing him, you know he’s hot. He has to be to land over 100 hot guys to “make beautiful art” with. (A note to straight readers: Unlike in straight culture, where being rich, famous, or talented can get you laid, in gay male culture, being hot, or at least fulfilling the requirements of a certain type remains a modus operandi.) And he is. Fader’s artist photo on his website might as well be used in SCRUFF marketing campaigns: Furry, bearded, topless but with shades, Fader embodies the hipster-art otter fantasy.
Plastiglass Journal
(Untitled) "There's a whole lot of authorship going on" Sean Fader X Richard Prince
by Annie Shepard
This piece rejects the idea that the author is dead. Instead, its title, Backdrop for the rebirth of the collective author (“There’s a Whole Lot of Authorship Going On.” - Richard Prince) declares the rise of collective authorship. It’s not about who made what, but about engaging with a larger community.
The Huffington Post Arts and Culture
Sean Fader Explores The Art Of Online Dating In 'Sup?'
If you've ever taken your love life to the digital sphere, you're familiar with the stressful, agonizing and self-esteem destroying task that is creating your dating profile.
From choosing accurate yet complimentary photos to summing up your charm, wit and brains in a succinct bio, the challenge at hand is an arduous one. In an exhibition entitled "Sup?", Sean Fader explores the complexities of online representations, mixed desires and the occasional breaches of truth:
Next Magazine's Getting Personal
This photographer explores the relationship between online and real-life identities with his series of photographs, Sup?
By Will Pulos
If you’ve ever met up with someone you’ve talked to online, you know that reality can often be quite different than expectations. That tricky relationship between online personas and real-life identities was what inspired photographer Sean Fader’s most recent project, Sup?
Queerty
The Art Of Hooking Up
Perception versus reality: when it comes to the world of online dating — or more accurately, online hooking-up — one can often be vastly different than the other. With only a handful of pictures and words to get your message across and no real accountability, is it any wonder we live in the age of Catfish?
Through a series of portraits, artist Sean Fader explores the casual relationships gay men have with each other and the truth in his new exhibit, Sup?
Time Out Dubai
An art show about body hair in Dubai
By Peter Feely
Time Out Dubai gave my show at The Jam Jar Dubai a lovely write up. "For Dubai, the exhibition is both liberating and challenging – it’s almost impossible not to have some reaction. For starters, Sean Fader’s video installation is intimate and unusual."
Gulf News
Plucking the many strands of identity
By Jyoti Kalsi
Although there is an unabashed objectification of the male body in some of these artworks, the subject of this show is not the body but hair, which shapes our social encounters through its association with status, race, culture, religion and gender. Each of these artists is dealing with their personal encounter with the world and personal understanding of themselves vis-à-vis male body hair and the technologies related to it. What makes the show more interesting is the interaction and dialogue between the different artworks and artistic perspectives
The pictures thus explore our interactions in the online social realm and social encounters in the real world, and the challenges of maintaining privacy and intimacy in this digital age.
Hyperallergic Labs
The photographs in Fader’s I Want to Put You On series are unnervingly clever.Physical identity seems disposable in the images and the subject is both the artist and his friends, suggesting that they are possibly a commentary on their relationship.
Creative Loafing
Polymorphous perversity at Undressing the Feminine at the Mindy Solomon Gallery
By Megan Voeller
Let's stick with elation for now. There's a palpable sense of it in Sean Fader's portraits, like the perky-nippled sylph who anchors the show -- an Olympia for the Photoshop-savvy genderfuck set.
Lenscratch
Sean Fader
By Aline Smithson
New York photographer, Sean Fader, likes to play with himself. Over and over. Working in the style of some other self-focused photographers--Cindy Sherman, Kelli Connell, Aaron Hobson, and Robert Rainey--Sean's work manages to reflect not only himself, but a little bit of all of us. Starting out as an actor, Sean has combined his photographic and photoshop skills to produce his own stage show, and has lots of accolades to show for it. No other cast members need apply.
FLAVORWIRE:
Sean Fader: The Hipster Answer to Cindy Sherman?
By Caroline Stanley
In the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Fader re-imagines himself as different characters from a teenager, to a housewife, to a hermaphroditic sophisticate. He's also fond of using his Photoshop skills to create images where he jokes, abandons, and makes out with himself and, stretching the boundaries of self-portraiture into the digital age, he includes a piece featuring his California Googleganger
Next Magazine
Who's Next '09
By Derrickn Reaves
Next Magazine names Sean Fader the visual artist of 09
Every year Next Magazine selects the people that it thins are going to be high in gay culture in the coming year.
Newcity Art
By Jason Foumberg
In Sean Fader’s photographs, self-portraits are manipulated so that each frame contains multiple selves, and sometimes the artist is pictured as wearing a false body, such as a pre-adolescent or an overweight man. His skin has a zipper in the front, revealing his real body beneath. Fader’s self-love affair, combined with his always expressionless stare, seems to be an honest portrayal even if it looks like acting. Playing the part just comes naturally.
F News Magazine
Post 9/11 Fears Addle Artists
By Tara Walker
Everybody’s always asks me, what kind of work do you make? Do you make landscapes? Do you make portraits? Do you shoot people, or dogs? And I say, well, I photograph myself, mostly. And they say, oh, so you’re a self-portrait artist. And I say, no, well, I just happen to be in most of my pictures. But I’m not a self-portrait artist. Let’s open up that conversation to a larger audience. Let’s show all the different ways that people are not doing a self-portrait. Which is one reason why we called this, “This is not a self-portrait.
Chicago Free Press
By Paul Varnell
One of the most remarkable images is Sean Fader’s cross-gender “I Want to Put You On, Raini” It shows a slender young man with visibly hairy chest lying on a couch and holding a glass of wine. But he has a zipper pulled part way up the front of his body that is part of a female skin with a gently curving breast he is surrounding himself with.
ARTICLE: The New York Times
February 25, 2007
"16 students selected from over 800 studios; the best of the new artists in the U.S."
Read it here