Portrait of a Landscape, group exhibition of 16 artists from Buenos Aires and NYC with a material approach to photography, Shirley Fiterman Art Center at BMCC CUNY, NY, NY, Aug 3rd – Sept 10th 2016.
Buenos Aires:
Erica Bohm, Ayelen Coccoz, Claudia Cortínez, Estefanía Landesmann, Samuel Lasso, Carolina Magnin, Pedro Wainer
New York:
Louis Chan, Esperanza Mayobre, Alva Mooses / Troels Heiredal, James Hyde, Myeongsoo Kim, Barney Kulok, Libby Pratt, Karen Tepaz, Max Warsh
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In the practice of photography, the terms portrait and landscape have come to define not only the medium’s most traditional genres but also the standards of composition when viewing or making an image. Portrait of a Landscape plays with these conventions and draws a line between continents; it brings together artists from New York and Buenos Aires, Argentina to propose a meeting point between the photographic and physical world. Curated by Claudia Cortínez, a visual artist who has lived in both cities, the exhibition plays with reformatting the photograph as an object, each artwork unfolding its parameters of viewing as a physical experience.
The authority of light grants a lot of liberties regarding truths and imperfections. Still, you can manipulate and abstract an image away from every sense of the real except for its source and duration of exposure. In Portrait of a Landscape, photographic impressions are reframed in terms of the physical and emotional pressure each image exerts: making visible the displacement of light around objects; highlighting the simultaneous veracities and distortions of memory; emphasizing the “plastic” aesthetics of the landscape through color and texture.
The effect is not only to break apart the components of photography, but also to describe the context in which these artworks were made. In this way, the exhibition proposes distinct ways of depicting a place, as well as its prevalent sensibilities regarding a sense of location, image, and the photographic process.
