Photographic Visions – Winter 2021
A curated international photography exhibition
January 14 – February 3, 2021 (Main Gallery)
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Photographic Visions is a biannual exhibition at PH21 Gallery, showing mini-series of the works of selected artists who submitted their portfolio for our solo exhibition competition. Our aim is to celebrate the work of photographers whose portfolio is progressive and visionary, forwarding photography in the 21st century.
Photographic Visions – Winter 2021 presents three images (in the form of mini-series) from ten photographers.
To find out more about the photographers, please click their names to visit their websites.
View and order an exhibition catalogue here.
Exhibiting artists:
I recently produced a body of still life portraits, inspired by the extraordinary statue of “Nefertiti”, on exhibit at the Neues Museum in Berlin. I titled the series, “La Belle est Venue”, which is the French translation of “Nefertiti”, literally “beauty has come”, a fitting name for the Egyptian queen, reputed for her exceptional grace. My work tells real human stories through fictional narratives, reveals palpable emotions through inanimate objects and morphs objective reality into a subjective one.
My work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence social change. It is not reality, and not the future, but one possible future. While the images in the series "When the Trees are Gone" have an apocalyptic tone, they are inspired also by humor. Ultimately, this work is not pessimistic. I am hopeful that, as many urban planners and landscape architects already are, we can find new approaches to urban design.
My "Oh My Goddess!” series celebrates the women who have influenced me. Most of these women are part of my extended family, and are living full and active lives in southern France, where I am from. A few of these women have now passed, but their memories live on. I mean to convey what is most beautiful about them, reinterpreting that beauty, even transforming them into goddesses.
A reflection over memory as pain, the paradoxical family history as a pillar and nest of fossilized and irreparable incorporeal erosions. Immersion in this intricate and complex inner map with the desire that the image expresses the imperceptible. These pieces of work are an attempt, intimate and very personal, to give a body to the ghosts that disturb me so that the viewers can identify through my photographs those that bother themselves.
My previous series, “Earth” had the sphere as its unifying shape and now this series is the square. These formally constructed images of the skies usually includes in the image, some connection to the earth: a tree, a contrail, a bird. Each image is a square with square/s from the image placed upon the clouds. The square has great significance for me for a number of reasons.
The Dutch Master Painter’s of the seventeenth century are among my favorites. Especially the still life painters. Their compositions and the way they “paint the light” captivate me. With the Dutch Masters as inspiration, my background in sculpture, and my passion for photography, exploration of the Still Life Photograph is a welcome direction in my creative journey. One that I am eager to explore.
In developing scenes, I try to choose architectural backgrounds against which I can display separated figures, distributing or choreographing them across the frame. The architecture becomes incidental to a scene or situation that may or may not evolve within it. I tend to look for sites or places where people pass through without congregating.
My work deals with the uncanny -- those instances in which the world is rendered both familiar and strange. They are places where wonder and cruelty co-exist, the one informing the other, and where creatures are presented in the half-life of taxidermy. In this series, Unnatural History, I am equating the experience of confronting with the natural world as part of an initiation right into an ancient mystery cult.
The experiences that I lived during my childhood and adolescence, are the leading direction that my projects are based on. Impacts that I lived because of a change of cultures and surroundings that seemed extreme and far away from reality. Mexico and Berlin are two worlds that influenced my beliefs and cultural understanding, that lead me to question contemporary societies, the way in which certain socio-political beliefs are practiced, their truth and reality and the illusion that may be behind a concept.
Through my work I aim to regain the lost feeling of presence, typical of the analogue era, when life was slower paced and even feelings seemed to last longer. I create images that at a first glance seem “wrong” to arrest and induce a state of contemplation in the viewer to help her/him to regain the feeling of presence and calmness, that has become extremely rare in the schizophrenic times we live in. My work has been defined by art critic Lorenzo Belenguer as “romantic conceptualism”.