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
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
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.
Photographer Naima Green and Photo Director Toby Kaufmann just launched a Kickstarter to support this timely project.
In 1995, photographer Catherine Opie created the now legendary "Dyke Deck,” a 52 card (plus jokers) deck of playing cards illustrated with photographic studio portraits of Opie’s friends, each representing different members of the lesbian community.
Today, more than two decades later, photographer Naima Green and award-winning, former Refinery 29 Photo Director Toby Kaufmann have joined forces to launch reinterpret the deck with a broader, intersectional understanding of contemporary queer identity. The new, more inclusive deck, called Pur·suit, also acknowledges issues impacting the transgender community in the United States, and is complemented by a continuously updating website with more than 100 portraits, video and audio files that tell the stories of each participant.
Inspiring as it is, Pur·suit coming to fruition will depend on the success of its Kickstarter campaign. It’s a project we believe in so we spent some time with creators Naima Green and Toby Kauffman to learn more.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Naima Green and Toby Kaufmann
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
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.