Mika Rottenberg "Performance Stills"
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
This event has ended.
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery presents a series of photographs from a special project for W Magazine by Mika Rottenberg.
The first U.S. exhibition of her large-scale photographic series is accompanied by the release of a smaller format print portfolio.
Best known for video installations that explore relationships between the body and production, Rottenberg built an elaborate multi-chambered set in her Harlem, NYC studio as a commission for W Magazine’s 2008 Art Issue. The resulting suite of seven photographs reimagines the fashion magazine format: subjects with extraordinary physiques, primarily female, occupy a claustrophobic spatial architecture which serves as part of their attire.
As in previous video works, the physical construction is tailored to the bodies of the actors who occupy them and the activities they perform, creating a series of tableaux within a warren of vertical and horizontal cubicles. Limbs, isolated and compartmentalized, become objects. In one shot, a woman’s extreme stature, too tall to fit in a single room, is the basis for a peculiar bisection. The bottom half of her body bends and passes through an aperture while her torso enters the composition impossibly from the opposite side of an upper chamber. The final photograph fuses material inventiveness, the camera’s fiction, and a sense of the perform-
ers’ corporeality.
The framing of these characters complicates the camera’s voyeuristic gaze. In this visually seductive terrain, punctuated by candy colors and dark, mysterious spaces, body and environment engage in a radical redefinition of subject.
Media
Schedule
from January 23, 2009 to February 28, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-01-23 from 18:00 to 20:00