Victoria F. Gaitan & Cecilia Paredes
dal 9/11/2010 al 7/1/2011
Segnalato da
9/11/2010
Victoria F. Gaitan & Cecilia Paredes
Curator's Office, Washington
Both photographers in this exhibition seduce the viewer with a wealth of rich color, ornamentation, and drama associated with traditional baroque style. The artists draw the viewer into a lush personal landscape that is alluring at first but far from Eden. The women inhabiting these images want us to examine the strained identities embedded within their lovely facades.
Continuing with this fall’s investigation of the use of baroque issues in contemporary art, Curator’s Office is pleased to present Foto Baroque: Victoria F. Gaitán & Cecilia Paredes. The exhibition takes place during Foto Week DC 2010.
Both photographers in this exhibition seduce the viewer with a wealth of rich color, ornamentation, and drama associated with traditional baroque style. THE artists draw the viewer into a lush personal landscape that is alluring at first but far from Eden. The women inhabiting these images want us to examine the strained identities embedded within their lovely façades.
The three photographs of Victoria F. Gaitán’s Sweet Meats series are simultaneously sensual and unsettling. Characterized by an over-abundance of earthly delights often found in Flemish Baroque Golden Age still life paintings, the images depict the rich colors and textures of food overflowing on the table and from the mouths of the female subject. Gaitán juxtaposes a plethora of alluring earthly treats with a morbid reminder of their ephemeral nature. She conjures an insistent but unattainable desire, a feeling enmeshed with the eating disorders these photographs also call to mind. Gaitán’s women appear compelled to binge, smeared with the sugary goo they are consuming to excess. They are confrontational in their performative awareness; their expressive eyes meet our own amidst the beautiful wreckage of indulgence and ornament. Still, despite this explicit point of contact, we are uncertain whether the women are confident exhibitionists or pleading victims.
While the women in Gaitán’s photos present themselves boldly and frontally, glowing against the darkness behind them, Paredes attempts self-camouflage within two-dimensional, florally patterned planes as the subject of the “photo-performances” in her Skin Deep series. As with Gaitán’s images, these too hold a fragile duality. Paredes chooses her own quiet concealment, yet the relentless embellishments also threaten to trap or absorb her entirely. Here the artist offers herself as both portrait and non-portrait. She emerges as she disappears in her skillful striving for a surface harmony, existing so much as a part of her surroundings that, for brief moments, she ceases to exist as herself at all. The photographs evoke Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, in which we sometimes find the artist camouflaged by mud or laying naked on the earth with a partial cover of white flowers. Like Mendieta, Paredes has relocated extensively throughout her life and acknowledges this experience as influential on her theme of assimilation in a variety of locales.
Gaitán and Paredes expertly engage with opulent settings that fill the frame to excess. They simultaneously control their surroundings carefully yet struggle to maintain that control as boundaries are blurred between self and object. Catering equally to lavish beauty and the threat of being overwhelmed, both artists evoke the baroque theatre as a natural metaphoric space to play out the drama of a complex and fluctuating feminine identity.
Victoria Gaitán received her BA in Photography from the University of South Australia in 1993, and from there moved on to New York and London to continue her artistic endeavors. She moved to DC in 2007, and has been avidly shooting since 2008 when she acquired a digital camera. Victoria is known for her “flesh and blood still lifes” that explore internal worlds, illness, in-between states, shared delusions and hells, stillness, memory, interpretations of pain, private and public intimacies, trauma, beauty and conditioned responses. She has exhibited her work in DC, New York, London, Australia, and China.
Born in Lima, Peru, Cecilia Paredes currently lives and works between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and San Jose, Costa Rica. Paredes has shown extensively in galleries, museums, and organizations internationally such as The World Bank Art Program, Washington, DC; The Natural World Museum; the Costa Rica Museum of Art, San Jose, Costa Rica; Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL; Arte y Naturaleza, Madrid, Spain; Sol de Rio Arte Contemporaneo, Guatemala; Lucia de la Puente, Lima, Peru; Arthobler Gallery, Porto, Portugal; Museo C. Guardia San Jose "El Jardin de Dafne," Costa Rica; University of Indiana, US; Universidad de Salamanca Centro de la Fotografia, Salamanca, Spain; Seem: Camuflajes y Transparencias, New York, NY; ARCO Art Fair, Galeria ArtexArte, Madrid, Spain; Galeria ArtexArte, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Panama; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo: Rutas Alternas, San Jose, Costa Rica; Museo de Arte Moderno, Guatemala. Her works are in the collection of The San Antonio Museum of Art, Deutsche Bank, Javier Varez, Madrid, SpainLehigh University Collections, USA; Costa Rica Museum of Contemporary Art and Design; The Contemporary Museum, Panama; Natural World Museum, California; University of Salamanca Collection, Spain; University of Engineering, Lima Peru; Art Nexus Collection Centro Wifredo Lam, La Habana, and The World Bank, Washington, DC
Image: Cecilia Paredes, Paradise, 2009, photo-performance with body paint, Lambda print on paper mounted onto aluminum
Opening Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 6-8pm
Curator's Office
1515 14th St NW, DC 20005, Washington
Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm and by appointment
Free admission