In Marcel Pardo Ariza four portraits, in Dismantling of monoliths at SF Camerawork, hung at different heights, the people photographed embrace each other tenderly and stand side by side. None of them look at the viewer.
Ariza wanted it that way. We think the portrait shows the whole body, they said, but it doesn’t have to be.
“What I claim with my work is that even just allowing people to see gestures of yourself can give you insight into who that person is while not revealing their face,” they wrote. they stated. Hyperallergic. “There’s this idea of the cover-up agency, and how much you decide to show and for whom.”
The photos are part of a series, After the touchwhich Ariza did in the summer of 2021, after vaccines became available and people were coming together again.
“There was this idea that not touching for a long time was an act of solidarity, and then we would meet again and share that intimacy,” Ariza said. “I had just had surgery, and I felt like that idea of touch for myself had also changed because I felt like I had a new body.”
Jamil Hellu, the curator of Dismantling of monolithschose artists like Ariza who he sees as trying to reframe historical legacies.
“Marcel brings forward a conversation about trans visibility and trans expression in a way that celebrates trans identity,” Hellu said. Hyperallergic. “The work is epic. This is what is needed right now. »
Hellu, who lives in San Francisco and teaches in the art department at Stanford University, says he’s seen a change in his students that began with protests over the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.
“I find students have an active voice in a way that I’ve never experienced before,” he said. “It’s the way they talk about these issues in the classroom and the discussions around the awareness of the lack of representation of women, not just in the arts, but in general, and the lack of racial representation. They are genuinely keen to speak out on issues of social injustice.
Dismantling of monoliths features three artists from the Bay Area and three from other parts of the United States. He said the grouping aims to “connect local artists with outside conversations.”
Aaron Turnerphotographer and professor in the Department of Art at the University of Arkansas who has worked from his dark alchemy series in the show, appreciates the idea of artistic dialogue with other artists.
“I kind of borrowed this concept of ‘discursive enterprise’ from Kerry James Marshall who talks about it in different conferences,” Turner said. Hyperallergic. “It’s this whole idea of how we are all as connected artists, in terms of how our work is in conversation with each other. The different ideas that we pursue in the studio environment are all part of the discursive enterprise.
One of Turner’s works in the exhibition features two images of Frederick Douglas, reflected in shattered hand mirrors. He explained his use of abstraction to examine issues of identity, history and representation in his work.
“I use abstraction to talk about race and challenge that notion. I merge abstraction and representation,” he said. “I use a lot of archival material, and maybe I have a particular opinion about Malcolm X or a particular opinion about a period in history, but I’m not necessarily trying to win an argument over the story I’m just trying to present it in a meditative way to revisit the story and have a conversation about it.
San Francisco Artist Forrest McGarvey is one of the few who does not use a camera. Instead, he uses found material and images he finds on sites like Pinterest and Google Images, wanting to find ways to represent himself with images of other people. In his series Representationhe has made collages that he says “reflect on the performance of identity” from images of Pacific history, video games, film and television.
The artists who spoke with Hyperallergic agreed that photography, now an accessible and immediate medium, is a particularly appropriate vehicle for expressing changing social attitudes.
“In teaching photography, we talked about the same people over and over again. Even when I was a student, I had just discovered Minor White and Ansel Adams, and all those people,” Ariza said. “I think we’re at a point where we’re discovering black and brown photographers.”
