Culver City's art district has accumulated many a white-walled gallery, and among them is Kopeikin. Ascending the humble staircase out front, I leave the rush hour chaos behind and enter a fresh world of photography. I am the only patron at this late afternoon hour on an uneventful weekday, completely unaware that Moby is a photographer, and the exhibit will inevitably open my eyes to this previously enigmatic side of the multitalented artist.
Stepping into the Moby section, I am immediately comforted with a feeling of warm invitation from the crowds congregating across the lengths of the room. The right side is covered with swarms of music fans, split up and clustered into photographs of arbitrary size. The left side comes across as more collected; five pieces lined up horizontally with the centermost being the largest and, employing hierarchy of scale, most important. This particular photograph seems to be the only one in the exhibit that strays from the all-around theme of fervent crowds on tour.
The photographs themselves and the environment they create within the gallery seem to play on competing feelings--togetherness versus loneliness, being attended to versus being unattended, being supported enthusiastically versus being solitarily destroyed--translating precisely the album’s reflections of the strangeness of being on tour but in photographs rather than songs. Full concerts and feelings of disconcertion are juxtaposed. Lonesome me in an empty room with crowds of people around me cheering in unison is comparable to what Moby was trying to achieve: the stark contrast between the barren dressing rooms, hotel rooms, and airports and the energetic, loving, jam-packed crowds seen from onstage.
The album is a defining of Moby's thoughts while on tour aurally, catering to the ears;
while the photography is a defining of those same thoughts visually, catering to the eyes.
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