Leah Tinari "Perfect Strangers"
Mixed Greens Gallery
This event has ended.
Mixed Greens presents Leah Tinari’s fifth solo exhibition. This is the first time Tinari exhibits portrait paintings of strangers.
For over a decade, Leah Tinari captured the nightlife, celebrations, and vacations of her friends and family. Using imagery captured on her personal camera, she painted familiar faces and situations in which she herself was often participating. People in Tinari’s life appeared and reappeared until the viewer began to feel comfortable in Tinari’s intimate circle.
During her last solo exhibition at Mixed Greens, Tinari installed a handmade, low-tech photo booth amid her paintings, where visitors could sit and snap photos. The sitter was able to choose a background fabric and then press the shutter button, knowing the artist would catalog the photos. Up until that point, Tinari’s subjects were, for the most part, candid in their poses. Now her subjects acted as formal sitters, looking into the lens, knowing what might happen.
Over the past year, Tinari painted a selection of these photo booth snapshots. In doing so, she was able to document one aspect of an exhibition that most artists do not get to witness—the everyday gallery-goers who view their work over the course of a show. Turning the tables on the viewer, Tinari closely examined the very visitors who initially examined her paintings. In this way, Perfect Strangers pays homage to the viewer.
In addition to the expanses of patterned, draped fabric in the background of each painting, new dimensions have been incorporated into Tinari’s work: a self-consciousness, a nod to historical portraiture, and a diversity of people, textures, and expressions that were absent in previous series. The ‘red-eye,’ messy hair, and exuberant gestures of her prior lexicon have been transformed by the stillness of the sitters holding their poses until the camera shutters.
Media
Schedule
from November 18, 2010 to January 08, 2011
Opening Reception on 2010-11-20 from 18:00 to 20:00