Artist Spotlight: Michael Petry

 As with the Nature Mortes, for my 2005 series of Web Portraits, I asked men and women on the Web to send me images of their anuses to form the basis of a portrait. Initially I took a piece of leather in the color of the fetish they were most interested in (as in the glass works) and then hand-sewed it into a portrait as similar to the image sent to me. As the originals images were photographs, these objects were also then photographed to form their final state. In all the Web Portraits, the images sent to me were confidential and destroyed after use. Equally, there was no way to verify if the image sent was from the person claiming that identity, so the resultant portrait was a Web Portrait of who they identified with in the virtual world. — M.P.