As the horrendous pun intends, this exhibition by four highly creative photographers - Ricardo Barros, Ilya Genin, Neil Larsen, and Andrew Wilkinson -- opening January 9th, 2010 at ArtWorks, is designed to push the envelope of our imagination.
META-MORE-Faces explores how far the photographer/artist can move from the point of departure - the "face" as perceived by his eye/lens-without losing sight of where the subject originated.
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 For Barros, a fulltime professional photographer, the face is a remarkable series of portraits he created for his book "Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas", published by Image Spring Press. "My premise for the photographic sessions was simple: the response to an artwork can be as creative and as interpretive as the artwork itself."
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For Genin, an exceptional still-life and portrait photographer on his way  to becoming a professional, the focus is on his fascination with the macabre expressed in arrestingly composed images of dolls, dead animals, homeless people, and other surreal images. "A metamorphosis is a process of change, a period of fluctuation and ambiguity when the very essence of a person or object changes, sometimes beyond recognition."
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Larsen is a highly gifted amateur with a personal viewpoint based on a depleting  stock of Polaroid film. His work is an art unto itself expressing in a deliberately small format a "face" that is hauntingly evocative of times and places gone by. "The look of an image transfer and emulsion lift makes me feel that I have gone deeper - another layer - into the original image. My photographs are, I hope, an extraction of what I see. The image transfer and emulsion lift is, in turn, an abstraction of my feelings when I made the original image. It's like a clouded memory where only pleasant thoughts remain."
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 Wilkinson is a multi-disciplinary artist and media strategist, whose work encompasses a wide range of subjects. For META-MORE-FACES he was inspired to do a visual display of prints and projections derived from his ongoing "Photo-a-day" series. "During this project Cartier Bresson's 'decisive moment' became more and more evident to me in practice. I would see an object or pattern and 'click' - that would be my photo of the day. When I looked at them by month, the 'decisive moment' became my 'decisive memory'. I could remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. The assignment serves as a visual diary, which I continue to make."
The combined impact of the work of these four photographers curated by Jon Naar adds up to one of the most exciting and provocative exhibitions that ArtWorks (or any other gallery) has produced in recent times. |
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