Curated by Christina Fernandez, a brand new exhibition at Gallery Luisotti selects works by seven conceptual photographers based mostly within the Los Angeles space, whose performative actions are meant to be seen within the type of the nonetheless picture. The artists are William Camargo, James Francisco Garcia, Arlene Mejorado, Star Montana, Aydinaneth Ortiz, Juan Manuel Valenzuela, and Christopher Anthony Velasco.
Residing and dealing in Southern California, these younger Chicano/a artists have shaped a group of friends and are supported by one another artistically, professionally, and socially. Their work is knowledgeable by a shared Latinx historical past and lineage that features ASCO’s “No Films”, work by Laura Aguilar, in addition to images by Fernandez herself, all of whom devised performative gestures for the digicam.
El Cuerpo: The (Performing) Physique and the Photographic Stage options work by which the artist is each the maker and the topic. Every artist constructs conditions which can be carried out in entrance of the digicam, and in doing so demonstrates an consciousness of circumstances of self-presentation. This consists of contemplating oneself inside the constructed setting or surrounding panorama—and, extra particularly, in relation to Los Angeles as a spot and its advanced circumstances as a backdrop.
The featured works vary in content material from displays of the physique by means of portraits and self-portraits, to depictions of mundane middle-class experiences, to politicized interactions with gendered settings and conditions. Private rituals, intimate sexual imagery, and complicated household experiences are all a part of the artists’ performative acts for the digicam. The outcomes are excavations of particular person identities contextualized by means of experiences of town and its suburbs and underpinned by conceptual approaches to picture making fairly than by social documentary or narrative pictures.
