Raquel Nave "Live Free in Hell"
Mountain Fold Gallery
This event has ended.
Mountain Fold announces the opening of "Live Free in Hell," an exhibition of photography and video by Raquel Nave. The show contains polaroids of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, Nave, her family, and her companions. The snapshots represent the identity exploration of a young woman and the journey of an artist working in her style and medium.
Stances and expressions in Nave's photographs reveal her unique personal narratives. Used alternately, they suggest the subsuming of other identities. The American artist establishes tableaux with herself and her female friends as subjects; her intimate compositions represent the multifarious aspects of her gritty world. Juxtaposed are landscape shots, unpremeditated yet instinctively aware of some wonderment captured--quilted clouds hovering over placid ground. Nave also presents abstractions derived from human content: she preserves those bleached-out moments that by chance the polaroid developmental process has distorted, leaving beautifully mystifying images. Intense highlights stand out against flesh tones, lost along the peaks of bare knees, elbows and breasts, all of which manifest saturated white contours.
In some pieces Nave appropriates her experience as a model in fashion photography by exploiting the genre to take ownership of her images and creativity.Challenging the boundaries of the role of photographer and model, she subverts the conception of the objectified model by placing herself as both the object and subject of the work and of the lustful gaze. Punctuating the portraits are stills of seemingly banal objects: a painted guitar; a gas pump; plastic flowers. Yet these quotidian things, while creating a visceral contrast with the figural pieces, establish an environment that is neither extraordinary nor subcultural, but distinctly real and present: beneath clothing and betwixt everyday sights lie desires so powerful, they seem to explode from Nave's photographs.
The images, taken as a collection, reveal the artist's dynamic discovery of self through play, performance, and pose; through the camera; through the viewer's gaze; through the environment that surrounds her; through her split exhibitionism and voyeurism.
Media
Schedule
from June 17, 2010 to July 17, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-06-17 from 19:00 to 21:00