Jamie Diamond "Portrait Histories"
Galeria Ramis Barquet (Chelsea)
This event has ended.
Portrait Histories is an exploration of the oldest popular use of photography, the family portrait. At all stages of family life, photography has for the past century served to record and legitimize our existence. Diamond’s work reveals the fictions of this familiar photographic moment and in so doing explores the varying codes and rituals that regulate our photographic behavior. Determined less upon the capture of actuality than artifice, her work addresses the changing status of the medium and its inherent capacity to deceive.
Diamond uses this household genre of photography as a platform for further investigation into the discipline’s characteristic nuances and methods. By isolating and in some cases extending each of the image’s component signifiers, the artist reveals the flaws beneath the surface of the portrait, and undermines our faith in the veracity of what we are accustomed to seeing.
In Portrait Histories, she deconstructs the family portrait. The image is decomposed into three separate and distinct elements: the subject, their gestures and the photograph itself. The subject exists as a tableau vivant in the third gallery space: five strangers forming, holding and breaking a live family portrait pose for a non-existent camera. The gestures are displayed in the adjoining space on video screens; the smiles, heaving chests and held hands of varying Craigslist strangers emphatically conveying faked feeling. And in the main space, five monumental photographs surround the room, subjects removed, leaving dark portrait spaces, empty stage sets, vast stellar voids fabricated using vinyl contact paper and velvet.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2010 to October 02, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00