Schorr’s new exhibition Problems and other stories brings together photographs, collages, notes, drawings and video produced over the past seven years that reconsider who an artwork is for, the multitude of places people belong and the way Schorr encounters different worlds. Formed through the post-appropriation aesthetics of 1980s New York, Schorr’s work assembles and recontextualises the lives of artists and performers within her community, reclaiming pleasure, feelings of aliveness and queer experience as modes of political address. Schorr’s approach, closer to long-term studies of the subjects she depicts (including her seminal 2005 work Jens F.), centres intimacy and collaboration to exceed or shift the weight of the ‘problem’ of representation. The subjects Schorr works with each bring their own subjective view of the world, generating a spectrum of pleasures and terrors. The problem of being an artist – and of representing others – has long been a source of anxiety for Schorr, who took up fashion photography in the late 1990s, in part to work within a framework of consent and mutual benefit. But Schorr was also drawn to this world because it offered another way to problem-solve female and queer presence in the media landscape. When pleasure becomes a problem, the problem becomes the site of new language and new relational possibilities.
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