Webber Gallery is delighted to present Bachelor Suite, the latest body of work by Los Angeles-based photographer Peter Tomka.

In Bachelor Suite, photographer Peter Tomka tells a story of rebuilding after loss—the aftermath of losing one’s reference points and starting over from a place of sorrow and vulnerability. Here, photographs taken by the artist are juxtaposed with found images and references to the work of historicised photographers: a self-portrait of the artist sun- bathing appears, for instance, alongside a crushed prop plane; a couple kissing on a tree; a bottle of poppers on a studio floor, or the sink of Lee Miller’s darkroom.

This approach is recurrent in Tomka’s work, with each image being a cropped detail from larger scenes, sourced from a pool of thousands of photographs, both taken by the artist and researched, then combined to weave the project’s narrative piece by piece. The digital files, once cropped, are transformed into a form of digital negative. These resulting images, inverted and desaturated, are enlarged and projected onto light-sensitive paper, then subjected to chemical development in the artist’s bathroom. The enlargements are created through a make- shift glory hole, a highly symbolic system concurrent with his previous work, highlighted in Watering Hole, his exploration of the iconography of liquid and its libidinal economy in Los Angeles.

In the process behind Bachelor Suite, Tomka charged the enlargement process with an additional surrealist layer: the glory hole is now cut through a mattress, further enforcing the tie between the dream and the restful state, playing on the queer archetype and its graphic reference to gay pleasure and eroticism. The project’s conceptualisation and material realisation unfold entirely within the artist’s apartment, influencing his daily life and drawing his most intimate spaces into the public artistic sphere.

The apartment, resembling a hotel room without a kitchen, is located in the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown, LA—a century-old property, founded as a cooperative, taking its namesake from Gaylord Wilshire, following his written socialist principles that the building still tries to maintain today.The estate has an iconic presence within Hollywood’s imaginary, with its green neon light featured in productions like the noir film The Black Angel, which served as a source of inspiration for the artist. Aligned with the movie’s darkness, Tomka’s work is imbued with mystery and suspense.

The fragmentation of each photograph, divided into four parts
during the analogue printing process, evokes single flash images illuminating the crime scene; an aesthetic remnant of Tomka’s previous project, Studio Encore, examining tabloid and paparazzi images. This reference to voyeurism, underlying Bachelor Suite, recurs throughout the artist’s work, reflecting the constant surveillance ubiquitous in today’s society. “How do you get people to forget about that consciously and have them think about it subconsciously? How do
you embed that in any image without it being so obvious?”Tomka asks. Through the layering of abstraction achieved by isolating certain images, distorting projections, and composing each image in quadrants, he explores various ways to address these inquiries, confirming the camera as the ultimate voyeur.

Peter Tomka (b. 1989) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His work is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He holds a BA from the Univer- sity of Iowa and an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.