Valerie Piraino “Photoplay”
Cindy Rucker Gallery
This event has ended.
Cindy Rucker Gallery presents Photoplay, a solo exhibition of new work by Valerie Piraino, her first solo exhibition in New York City. Photoplay has historical and formal connotations, referring to both a term for a screenplay and experimentation with different approaches to photography. This exhibition includes a new series of photographs, a slide installation, and what Piraino terms “drawn sculptures.”
Photoplay takes theater and musicals as a point of departure and includes a photographic series, a slide installation and, what Piraino terms, “drawn sculptures.” These sculptures are a new body of work in which a burnishing method is used to make large photographic transfers onto drywall. The resulting images conflate photography, drawing, and sculpture by revealing the textured surface of the drywall, at once, referencing domestic spaces and theatrical design. Piraino’s installations and photographs critique nostalgia as she investigates how domestic interiors shape subjectivity. Creating works that mimic domestic spaces with a dated feel, Piraino looks to theater, literature, and cinema to make disorienting and haunting tableaux. Drawing from an archive of slides, these objects conjure the new and old. At once comforting and disorienting, Piraino’s eerie spaces act as a psychological backdrop where personal narratives and memories are continuously reinterpreted. Her photographs also explore the malleable nature of memories, in a more literal manner, as she experiments with form and image in a new body of work where the images are projected onto fabric. The original image is distorted as it bends and moves with the folds. The projected image calls upon the nature of the subjective and theatrical experience as information hides behind the curved folds and dark voids.
Valerie Piraino (b. 1981 Kigali, Rwanda) received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. She was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2009 - 2010 and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant in 2011 and 2012. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include “Could Not Bear the Sight of It” Contemporary Art Interventions on Critical Whiteness at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Chicago, Illinois (2014), Present Future, Artissima, Turin, Italy (2013), Round 39: Looking Back, Moving Forward, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2013), and Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2012). She lives and works in New York City.
Media
Schedule
from September 08, 2013 to October 13, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-08 from 18:00 to 20:00