Portland resident Dan Gluibizzi has a new body of work entitled Together We Follow, currently on view on his home turf, courtesy of Russo Lee Gallery. Over the last few years, Mr. Gluibizzi has spent countless hours adrift in a sea of imagery, gathering copious amounts of found portraits that document exhibitionism, exploratory sexuality, and fetishized subcultures. He is quite adept at contextual detachment, which he uses to set soft parameters for his subjects, coaxing different characters to mingle freely with each other in order to open the possibilities for alternative narratives.
With Together We Follow, we see a deeper rumination into the individuals themselves, as well as a contemplation of possible relationships and emotional exchanges between specific individuals. Instead of purely depending on the digital world, Mr. Gluibizzi has also woven some fabric of his own life, creating a personal intersection of both virtual and reality.
Gabe Scott: A great deal of your subject matter has focused on the realm of NSFW material, and while that content is still present at times, some of this exhibition contemplates less fetishized everyday behavior. Do you find yourself drawing parallels or creating an intersection of the two?
Dan Gluibizzi: It’s more like creating images with multiple browser tabs open at one time; what may start out as parallels eventually become intertwined. For years, gathering images was solely a desktop activity, where I would huddle over the keyboard hunting for images late into the night, making digital collages with amateur porn that would become paintings. Now, cruising for images has increasingly moved to my phone, often with different outcomes - less adult content and more portraits. It feels like a golden age of portraiture.
In so much of the imagery posted online, there is similarity and predictability, but through that repetition, there is subtle and nuanced human variation that I find to be beautiful. I know that using my phone is "fake searching." Algorithms already know what I want to see, which can be both irritating and humbling, though they are often correct. 
Why do you consider your phone "fake searching"?
Perhaps it is the last gasp of my 20th-century identity. I feel suspicious of the convenience. Yes, I am able to look for what I want in a search engine on my phone just as I would on my desktop, but more often than not the results do not feel like a legitimate discovery. Obsessively scrolling and swiping feels like looking at old magazines in a waiting room. Not to say a lazy phone search never adds to my work, but there is a twinge as I draw from those images. Interesting material should not be so easy to find.
Are you working more with subjects from your personal life as opposed to those mined from a digital space?
Yes, there are many more images from my personal life in my new work. As I collect on my phone, screen grabs are mixed in with snaps of daily family life. New works draw from selfie culture and the epic amount of portraits we swipe through daily. I find comfort in anchoring paintings with family, friends and the villains and heroes of current events; loved ones mingle with strangers and so on.
One notable progression for you in this series pertains to imagery existing in a hand cut presentation as opposed to a more traditional framed space. Tell me what prompted you to move your subjects outside of a more linear existence and focus more on the energy derived from a particular individual or partnership.
It felt like a natural step to take the figures and portraits off the paper and make them into shaped panels. The cuts I make with the jig-saw are directly from the cropping I make in photoshop when creating the initial collages. A big motivation was the desire to work with a different scale, new surfaces and an evolving sense of narrative possibilities. I do not always allow for hope in my work; I collect images that I find captivating, arrange them and paint them with little judgment. In contrast, the cut-outs are layered and hopeful. They provide a foundation for a story, searching for a connection.
In terms of your attraction to different individual representations or subjects in this body of work, does a common thread lie within?
I look for repetition both in the images I collect and the images I make. We all take the same pictures, wear the same clothes, smile, frown, and kiss in the same ways. I want to draw this beauty I find to be both unique and uniform. There is more blending of my interests in archiving collected images in the collaged space along with my impulse for narrative. Therefore, more stories are present in this body of work.
Certainly, the sheer volume of portraits we are inundated with—social media, professional profiles, daily documentarians, selfie culture - combined with technology that has become interwoven into the fabric of our society, exponentially increases the odds of generating good material. When you reference a 'golden age of portraiture', what contributes to that perspective beyond the obvious? What in terms the individual's ability to self-reflect or obsess over compiling memories to share stands out to you in our day and age?
The volume has a lot to do with it. Two billion smartphones making portraits is impressive and many of those are public. Perhaps we can never truly experience a golden age at the moment but it seems obvious that there will be an immense record of individuals, unlike any previous civilization.
Over twenty years I have amassed a large collection of books of portraits of artists. I love how these books provide glimpses into the intimacy of a working studio. Now, I have access to hundreds of artist studios through my phone creating a more direct artist driven perspective.
Despite trolls and bots, there are real individual humans celebrating others and themselves through these devices and platforms. It is wonderful that what once was strange and other is now mainstream and all at our fingertips. In the best possible outcome, human rights and dignity will coexist with both humor and pleasure.
Portrait photography by Aaron Busch
Dan Gluibizzi: Together We Follow
Russo Lee Gallery, on view through March 31.
Artist Talk March 17, 11am
http://www.russoleegallery.com
