commissaire Marisa Portolese
2 mars au 6 avril | March 2 to April 6
vernissage 2 mars 14h00 | March 2 ~ 2:00PM
galerielilianrodriguez.com
The Body and The Landscape is a contemporary photographic exhibition that brings together the work of an eclectic group of women artists that explore different permutations of the figure in nature and whose practices revolve around the genre of portraiture, the romanticized landscape and gendered space.
The Female Explorer / Patriarchal Heritage : Jessica Auer, Jinyoung Kim and Tema Stauffer.
JESSICA AUER
Meadow #18, 60 x 75 inches, vinyl adhesive, 2012
Jessica Auer’s Meadow was created on a journey throughout Europe, which began as a personal exploration of her family name and history. After learning that her family name roughly translates as ‘from the meadow’, she embarked on a European voyage to investigate the landscape that traced her patriarchal lineage. Through her photographic observations of various meadows, Jessica depicts the nuances of a tranquil paradise and concludes that these idyllic sites are mostly an illusion of nature. She recognizes that each individual imposes their own cultural impression upon landscape and although it is offered as the setting for her own personal mythology, she invites the viewer to bring his or her own reveries to the Meadow.
JINYOUNG KIM
from the series Fathers in Sanctuary, c-print, 30 x 40 inches, 2012
While Jessica investigates the landscape that bears history to her family name, Jinyoung Kim embarks on a similar personal journey to explore her patriarchal heritage. In The Fathers in Sanctuary, the Korean born photographer presents a series of color photographs that were created on a trip she took with her father in the summer of 2011. This was the first time Jin and her father returned to South Korea after immigrating to Canada 13 years ago. This homecoming unveils a compelling reunion between her father and grandfather. Due to circumstances beyond their control, their visit was short-lived and intense, lasting only 4 days, adding further complexity to this emotionally charged journey. In The Fathers in Sanctuary, Jin uses her camera to capture every fleeting but significant moment between her father and grandfather and presents the viewer with a very poignant psychological familial experience.
TEMA STAUFFER
White Horse, Riverview Florida from the series American Stills, 2007, c-print, 20 x 24 inches
In Tema Stauffer’s American Stills, created between 2000 and 2009, the American photographer travels throughout various regions of the United States to capture photographs of the American landscape and psyche. In American Stills, Tema explores themes of solitude, mystery and beauty. These road trips allow the photographer to create images that depict unpopulated interiors and roadside environments at ephemeral moments influenced by time of day using a combination of natural and artificial light. The photographs create a sense of tension between what is present and visible, and what is absent and implied. Quiet and minimal in some cases, or charged with intensity in others, the photographs express loneliness, anticipation and alienation. Saturated colors, empty spaces and fragments of things both strange and ordinary shape the psychology of these essentially American scenes.
Gender and the Landscape : Jasmine Bakalarz, Margaret Haines, Celia Perrin Sidarous.
JASMINE BAKALARZ
Untitled from the Beauty Pageant series, 43x50 inches, inkjet print, 2011
Jasmine Bakalarz’s photographic work consists of large-scale color portraits that depict children’s psychological states pertaining to their gender identity and social-cultural environment. She has investigated these issues through a large body of ongoing work exploring various North American children competitions. Jasmine often uses the landscape as an idyllic backdrop to photograph her subjects in various guises and poses in a typological manner. In her Beauty Pageants series, she focuses on young girls and addresses themes relating to beauty, body image and self-fashioning. The viewer is often left to contemplate how gender identity and idealized notions of beauty are often imposed.
MARGARET HAINES
(Untitled, Coco making of) Nite! Compromise!, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches, 2013
Images of girlhood are also at the core of Margaret Haines’ work. For this exhibition, she has created an assemblage and installation by using images from her recently published book, Coco x Love With Stranger. In this book, Margaret presents a visual character study of the main protagonist in her film, the young and hysterical girl, ‘Coco’. This character study is paired with different models for femininity and mainly explores Occultist, Kenneth Anger collaborator, and artist Marjorie Cameron’s relation to sexuality, performance, and the cultural landscape of 1950s and 1960s California. The assemblage includes an architectural placeholder for text, and three images from her book that portray scenes of various characters in the Californian landscape.
CELIA PERRIN SIDAROUS
Smoke Signals (Pink War), 30 x 40 inches, Digital Inkjet Print, 2010
Celia Perrin Sidarous stages an intervention in the landscape with Smoke Signals (Pink War), created in 2010. She depicts a one-time smoke incident at Gibraltar Point Beach on the Toronto Islands. A smoke grenade is ignited and photographed, until it burns out on a beach, during a summer afternoon with a looming oncoming storm. Celia’s photographic work over the past years has been concerned with the act of looking and outlines a strong interest in material life-material as in matter. Through an approach that favors observation and description and at times, intervention, it proposes a close reading of the world through objects, spaces, gestures, overlooked details, and fragments of the landscape. In Smoke Signals (Pink War) Celia makes her mark on the landscape by creating a transient yet feminized performance that is brief and uncontrollable due to the forces of nature.
Commentaires