Rona Yefman "Let it Bleed"
Participant Inc.
This event has ended.
"Let it Bleed" is a chapter from an extensive personal archive, "My Brother and I" (1996-2009). As early as 1996, her younger brother, Gil, was Yefman’s first model and inspiration. She began an intimate image record of their adolescence, using the camera to invent multiple novel identities in an imaginative world they constructed for themselves. This body of work became a joint archaeological journey, chronicling two siblings’ symbiotic existence as collaborative artists, and their mutual desire to live exterior to the norm. The most complex part of this project occurred between 2000-2009, during which time Yefman documented Gil’s intimate process of transformation from male to a female, and her subsequent transformation back to a biological male. Rebelling against conventional gender roles as well as familial ones, this extensive body of work is the focus of the exhibition, Let it Bleed, which combines images of formal role-play and performative acts with snapshots and mixed videotapes that expose very real emotional situations, chronicling an experience of youth through a curve of fantasies, hopes, and desires; disappointments, confusion, conflicts, and flirtation with familial taboos.
As an artist whose work defies political, physical, and psychological constraints, Yefman questions the elements that define an authentic existence. Her subjects embody the possibility of freedom, and her work as a whole is concerned with the gap between who we are, and who we want to be. The vulnerable yet strong identities explored through her photography, video, collected texts, collages, and installations comprise long-term collaborations with individuals who have formed radical personae. While the characters that emerge are a construction of something raw and authentic, they are also drawn from relationships developed through many years of collaboration, which allows spontaneous situations and novel identity formations to occur, constituting an assertion of self for both the artist and her subjects.
Media
Schedule
from November 14, 2010 to January 09, 2011