Sophie Delaporte “Needleworks”
hpgrp gallery
This event has ended.
hpgrp GALLERY announces “Needleworks,” an exhibition by Sophie Delaporte, a French fashion photographer whose images have appeared in publications such as Italian Vogue, Japanese Vogue, and i-D magazine, as well as in advertising campaigns for Le Bon Marché, Hermès, Dior, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier and Astier de Villatte. Bridging both commercial and high art, her photographs have been exhibited in solo shows in Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York.
Since 2002, when she had her first solo show at Marion Meyer Gallery in Paris, Delaporte has been interested in using fine art photography as a canvas in which to transform and reinvent images. Originally using her own fashion photographs, which she re-staged and re-took at their original locations to create a mise en scène, Delaporte eventually began appropriating images from other sources. In “Needleworks”—first shown at Scream Gallery, in London, in 2008—she saws apart pornographic images, and then “sutures” them back together with thread and fabric. She then photographs the resulting collages, which she blows up on a monumental scale. At the exhibition at hpgrp Gallery, she will display both the original collages in light boxes, and the large-scale images.
Because of her background as a fashion photographer, Delaporte is attuned to the fragility and vulnerability of a woman being objectified by the camera. By “dressing the invisible” in this series—or giving a layer of protection to the women being depicted—she is not only re-defining their beauty, she is also reflecting the act of seeing: we look at an image, and then, when it’s no longer in front of our eyes, we re-invent it from the fragments of our memory. Delaporte is mimicking the event on the surface of her photographs, forcing us to look closer, and actively engage with her work.
Media
Schedule
from March 15, 2012 to March 31, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-03-15 from 18:00 to 20:00