Photo: © Tanya Habouqa. From the series Tomorrow There Will be Apricots
SF Camerawork’s diverse group show uses photography, film, and performance to examine the in-limbo experience of immigrants straddling cultures.
Exhibition review by Roula Seikaly
Photo © Zanele Muholi
A multidisciplinary exhibition at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts challenges the social and economic barriers of the art world.
I know I’m in for a treat when a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts show is in the Richard C. von Hess Foundation Works on Paper Gallery. It’s an intimate three-room space with low ceilings and warm, gentle light, making it perfect for taking in prints, drawings, or, as in the case of Zanele Muholi and The Women's Mobile Museum, photography.
Child Pose. © Rachelle Mozman
A new exhibition uses photography, collage and video to reimagine – and defuse – one of art history’s most famous misogynists.
Artist Paul Gaugin was a chauvinist, a colonialist, and, like many celebrated painters, a pivotal perpetrator of the historical male gaze. His portraits presented native peoples as a sometimes barbaric, often sexualized fantasy. And if that doesn't bother you, perhaps his taking of underage brides in on the South Pacific Islands of Hiva and Tahiti in the late 1890’s, infecting them with syphilis and other diseases might make you twitch.
Despite being widely recognized and exhibited in most major institutions since his death, he was, like many men of art history, a predatory scumbag.
And here lies the jumping off point of Rachelle Mozman Solano’s latest exhibition Metamorphosis of Failure, on view through February at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. In Mozman-Solano’s series of films, staged portraits, and collages, she removes Gaugin's power, reimagining the mythology behind his conflicted French / Peruvian identity and satirically lampooning his search for subjects.
Mocking Gaugin's process with captions like "I Could Not Find The Authenticity I was Searching For," and " Here I am in Panama, In Excellent Health as Always," Mozman-Solano creates a sardonic narrative of Gaugin's process that empowers the women who were his muses. In no-frills studio setups, Gaugin's imagined conquests as well as an anonymous male figure dress in pseudo-nude body suits beside fake "native" plants in Home Depot buckets labeled "Let's Do This" and various other signs of perceived exoticism. Mozman-Solano's photographs and videos push the stories we know or imagine about Gaugin’s life and quests into absurdity that is light-hearted without simplifying or overlooking its history.
I spoke with Mozman-Solano to learn more about her show and interest in Gaugin.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Rachelle Mozman Solano
Found photograph from the collection of Ben Alper / The Archival Impulse
Songs about photography to listen to while you edit, shoot, curate, write, or do whatever it is you do at your non-photo-related day-job
For the past year or so, it’s been a fun quarterly tradition for us to “curate” (and on that note, remember a few years ago when folks in the art/photo community, including us, got mad at overuse of that word to describe organizing things like tech, music, or sock drawers, that we thought weren’t “curate-able” - we digress…) a Spotify mix related to the themes of our online exhibitions.
But we’ve never created one of songs more generally (or specifically) about photography.
So here goes - 30+ songs about photography to keep your mind on photography, often with the word “photography” (or camera) in the title or lyrics.
Special thanks to photographer and fellow music nerd Ben Alper for letting us use an image from his snapshot collection for the cover. Have fun, enjoy, and feel free to drop us an angry or friendly note letting us know what we’re missing.
© Sally Mann. Blackwater 3, 2008–2012. Tintype. Collection of the artist
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings isn’t just a glorious smattering of the artist’s photographs. The exhibition brims with tension between Sally Mann’s identity and a landscape tainted with racist history.
As a white woman who grew up in the American South, Mann’s representation of history and memory is loaded and heavy with complications. Most of the photographs on display in A Thousand Crossings – on view at the Getty Center until February 10, 2019 – are about memory and history: a cluster of domestic photographs of her children exploring the Virginia wilderness on vacation is juxtaposed with numerous images of Civil War battlefields, of Southern rivers and streams, of the Black woman who helped raise her, and the Black men she never noticed in her segregated community as a child. The sense of mystery and wonder she conjures in images of Civil War battlefields – and the swampy river beds where enslaved people found refuge and escape – is challenged by the inherent nature of these locations as sites and reminders of the horrific system of American chattel slavery.
Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger
