Angie Lea Tupper

This series is a meditation on the nature of celebrity. In today's internet age, Andy Warhol's prediction has proven increasingly prescient. 

These portraits stem from my fascination with obscure public personas, like Christine Chubbuck, Viva and Louis Waldon, Vic Chesnutt, and Venus Xtravaganza. They have shared intimate parts of themselves with us; their images flash briefly on public screens, and then traces of them remain scattered across the internet to be revived at random for brief moments of attention. More and more, the cultural landscape of our minds is populated by these happenstance figures, from people we follow by fleeting impulse on Instagram to faces we see pass through the wide web of low-budget porn. This surplus of digital access leads to a paradox of the contemporary zeitgeist: as our exposure to the phenomenon of celebrity becomes increasingly aleatory, our individual interests play a greater role in determining who and what we remember. While communications technology erodes the boundaries of localized media, it is simultaneously erecting transnational silos of fandom that are both ideological and idiosyncratic.

The household name is being supplanted by the handheld, politicized and personalized.