Identity

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Catherine Opie’s: High School Football

Catherine Opie’s images of teenage football warriors and their battlefields – finds new life in its first showing in New York.

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Cindy Sherman’s Retrospective At MOMA

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

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Madeinusa by Claudia Llosa

Spain-Peru  |  100 Minutes
www.filmmovement.com

PLEASE NOTE: This movie has beautiful photography however, the story depicts awful stereotypes about indigenous people in South America. On the contrary, Claudia Llosa’s second movie, “The Milk of Sorrow” is a great movie that shows in  a respectful and empowering way some of the horrors indigenous people faced during Peru’s decades of civil strife and it’s consequences now a days.

Madeinusa is a girl aged 14 with a sweet Indian face who lives in an isolated village in the Cordillera Blanca Mountain range of Peru. This strange place is characterized by its religious fervor. From Good Friday at three o’clock in the afternoon (the time of day when Christ died on the cross) to Easter Sunday, the whole village can do whatever it feels like. During the two holy days sin does not exist: God is dead and can’t see what is happening. Everything is accepted and allowed, without remorse. Year after year, Madeinusa and her sister Chale, and her father Don Cayo, the Mayor and local big shot, maintain this tradition without questioning it. However, everything changes with the arrival in the village of Salvador, a young geologist from Lima, who will unknowingly change the destiny of the girl.

Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa Movie Stills

Nancy Burson: Race, Beauty, & Power

Nancy Burson produced some of the earliest computer-generated portraits, and in collaboration with MIT engineers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, became a pioneer in the now familiar territory of computer-manipulated imagery. Burson continued to collaborate with Kramlich, who later became her husband. Together the two developed a significant computer program which gives the user the ability to age the human face and subsequently has assisted the FBI in locating missing persons. In Evolution II she combined the face of a man with that of a monkey to produce an imaginary portrait of a species (as well as a technology) in transition. This image was published in a series of manipulated portraits, reproduced in the book Composites (1986).

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Aziz + Cucher: Metaphors of New Technologies

Aziz + Cucher have been collaborating on and exhibiting digital photography projects and sculpture since 1991. They live and work in Brooklyn, New York. Anthony Aziz began with an interest in documentaries and photograpy, while Sammy Cucher’s work originated in theatre and video.

Their collaborative interest is in “creating visual metaphors for the increasing role that new technologies play in our lives and how they affect us politically, socially, and psychologically.” They explore the possibilities for human beings in a time when we can transform ourselves and nature from “known forms into unknown forms” as a result of the potential inherent in the coming together of computer science, biotechnology, genetics and nanotechnology.

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Carlos Amorales Vs. Amorales Interim

Growing out of a series of experiments with the mask, a fictional character behind a mask called ‘Amorales’ was created and lent to different individuals to perform in various situations where it was continuously emptied and filled up again with different ‘contents’ working almost invisibly, as a catalyst, within restricted frameworks. Using fictional identity as a ‘working tool’ Carlos Amorales found Mexican wrestling (lucha libre) offering that complex but flexible structure that helped him to develop his experiments further. The black and white reincarnations of confronting powers of Evil and Good exposed the archetypal aspects of relevant social and political positions.

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Anthony Goicolea’s Pre-adolescent Boys

Anthony Goicolea’s photographs of “pre-adolescent boys” question childhood & school-life with transgressive and erotic imagery. Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop.

“You and What Army” I act out childhood incidents such as fight scenes, first kisses, and deranged play dates. These works are simultaneously rooted in nostalgia and science fiction.

 

Anthony Goicolea
You and What Army Series: Class Picture
1999

Many of the sets are constructed to depict suburban environments in which the cast of characters are seen undertakeing painfully awkward transformations as they undergo the journey from childhood to adulthood.

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Yasumasa Morimura: Requiem for the XX Century

The self-portraits by the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, Requiem for the XX Century: Twilight of the Turbulent Gods, examines an array of historical figures and political events that have been significant in shaping the 20th century. Employing his usual methodology, Morimura uses costumes, make-up and props to create unconventional and bold renderings of iconic images from history.

While Morimura’s work has traditionally investigated femininity through iconic depictions of women from art history and popular culture, this body of work examines widely disseminated images of prominent masculine figures from the last century. Each protagonist or event is cast in a moment of apogee, when history is being made and visually captured. Substituting himself for ideologues, dictators or brilliant minds such as Einstein, Lenin, Che, Mao or Trotsky, Morimura reflects on his personal encounter of these images during his lifetime as well notions of masculinity embedded in politics and war. By re-contextualizing portraits and events into present day, Morimura offers a fresh look at these prominent men who, moved by wisdom, hate, ideology or idealism have carved a space in our collective psyche.

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Jeanne Dunning: Gender, Sexuality & Identity

Chicago artist Jeanne Dunning investigates the human body to create color photographs that question issues of identity, sexuality, and the interior and exterior self. Drawing from a variety of sources, Dunning’s images appear to be other than what they are: a piece of fruit resembles a human orifice; a woman’s head appears to be shaped like a phallus; a human hand takes on a smooth yet lumpy intimacy. In another series, Dunning’s body seems dwarfed by a huge, unidentified mass, leaving the viewer to project his or her own phobias and fetishes onto the images. Referred to as “representations that have been explicitly coded as representations,” by The Los Angeles Times, Dunning’s photographs at once fascinate and disturb, attract and repulse.

Jeanne Dunning’s photographic, sculptural and video work explores our relationship to our own physicality, looking at the strange and unfamiliar in the body, gender and notions of normality.

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Bodies and food have been important subjects for Dunning since 1990, when she created the series Samples. The work involved photographing mundane fruits and vegetables at close range to resemble human organs–a skinned tomato that evokes a swollen tumor, for example. In 1996 she began to make her own edible concoctions: thick, flesh-colored puddings and homemade icings. In this exhibition, a tapioca-like substance appears in several photographs, oozing down angles of the body or forming a pool under the head of a sleeping woman. The nature of the liquid remains ambiguous, alluding to sweet and vulgar things. Thus the images themselves can cause both attraction or repulsion, depending on the instinctive reaction of the viewer.

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Dunning’s work stimulates an irrepressible desire to look. In her photographs of women with mustaches and the insides of nostrils (dating from 1988), she encourages viewers to stare at what would normally be taboo. The same principle is at work in her recent photography. Each picture sets up a curiosity–something is often strange or unreconciled. This is especially true in her pictures of women. By emphasizing the crucial details or aberrations, Dunning refuses to let viewers passively indulge in female beauty.