About the Exhibit:
Working in modes between photo-based or digital technologies and more traditional, handmade expression, the artists explore issues of the projection or negation of visage within found or constructed environments.
All of the artists have, at times, worked with their own facial features but in each instance in disguised, veiled, camouflaged or displaced aspects. None of the artists appear to use themselves as means of self-exploration, but rather as vehicles for understanding the potential or actuality of perceptual diminution of distinct identity. Of related significance, each artist deliberately blurs boundaries between traditional and innovatory mediums and accepted or subverted conventions of portraiture.
Carla Gannis, for instance, has throughout her career actively challenged the divide between digital media and hand-made modes of expression. For many years she has used her “self” in conceptually and perceptually disrupted avatars as a disembodied presence in the virtual realm, often exploiting the psychologically disruptive relationship between physical and virtual supports.
JeeYoung Lee works in a literal and taxonomical space between mediums, constructing sculptural environments within which she places herself as a camouflaged protagonist. Her large scale C-prints in turn occupy an ambiguous position between performance and fixed image, sculptural event and cinematic or painterly composition.
Katherine Mangiardi has worked within various mediums to explore the extension, displacement and diffusion of the body in elaborately skilled activities such as lacework and figure skating. She has acknowledged overlooked or undervalued female originality in the historic lace industry through veiled, historically costumed photographic self-portraiture.
The career of Yooah Park has assiduously drawn paths between national tradition and contemporary alienation, incorporating studio painting and ritualistic performance art. There is an in-built tension in her painterly reworkings of her own photographs of self-conscious social players in which life-like individuality is undone through layered, veil-like whiting-out of faces.
— David Cohen —
David Cohen is editor and publisher of artcritical as well as founder-moderator of The Review Panel which takes place at the National Academy Museum, New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is podcast here at artcritical. He was Gallery Director at the New York Studio School from 2001-10 and art critic and contributing editor at the New York Sun from 2003-08. His books include “Serban Savu” (Hatje Cantz verlag, 2011) and “Alex Katz Collages: A catalogue raisonné” (Colby College Museum of Art, 2005).
