DICKERING Talia Chetrit Hannah Hoffman Gallery June 19 – Aug 14
Talia Chetrit: Pearls and Baby from DICKERING at Hannah Hoffman Gallery 41″ x 27″ archival pigment print
From the Hannah Hoffman press release:
Talia Chetrit’s latest images bring the camera home. Created over the last two years, the works in DICKERING unfold in the spaces where we loosen up and allow the coherent personas we craft for the outside world to melt away. Chetrit trains our attention on the intimate sites where personal boundaries dissolve, roles are negotiated, and power fluctuates moment-to-moment.
In Chetrit’s portraits of domestic life the cast of characters includes herself, her boyfriend, their child, cat, and a selection of props that intermingle with the quotidian routines of child rearing and the home. In Untitled, (Family #1), 2021, her boyfriend, dressed in women’s designer clothes, feeds their child without breaking his piercing gaze. And in Untitled (Family #2), 2021, wearing nothing but a blousy vest, he smiles cheerily at the camera while their child pokes at an uncovered electrical outlet. Despite the pretense of self-exposure in these and so many of Chetrit’s images, few of her works disclose much about the actual structure of her life, the nature of her habits, or her internal sense of self. Even in her self-portrait, in which Chetrit poses pregnant and draped only in a white button down shirt, the vulnerability of the image is undermined and refracted by her distorted face, covered with smeared makeup and a nylon stocking.
The power of Chetrit’s latest images hinges on an odd ambivalence between their banal settings and the presentations adopted by the adults within them. The characters’ gender contrivances and charms shift circumstance to circumstance and image to image, adding intrigue to the trappings of a middle-class life that serve as background. The posed postures and direct stares assumed by Chetrit and her boyfriend are less clues to their inner natures and more regular reminders of the camera’s presence, as well as the person behind it. These images revel in the fact that they are constructions, and as such they beg the question: who’s calling the shots in this drama? We imagine conversations about clothing, props, choreography, lighting, and setting, and the dialogue about what is presentable when first looking at the film. These works present a new set of negotiations between photographer, camera, and subject.
Talia Chetrit:Pregnant (Corey Tippin Make-up #1) from DICKERING at Hannah Hoffman Gallery. 40″ x 60″ archival pigment print
Talia ChetritUntitled (Family #2) from DICKERING at Hannah Hoffman Gallery. 40″ x 60″ archival pigment print
Talia Chetrit:DICKERING at Hannah Hoffman Gallery. June 19 – Aug 14
This is the first exhibition of Chetrit’s work we’ve helped produce for the Hannah Hoffman Gallery. We’ve been working with Talia since 2009.
New York Times Opinion “A Photographer’s American Road Trip” An-My Lê October 27, 2020
An-My Lê:Family Under the Presidio-Ojinaga International Bridge, Texas-Mexico Border, 2019. New York Times, October 27, 2020.
Reprinted from the New York Times:
These past four years, I’ve been on a photographic road trip of the United States. It often seems that there are two Americas, left and right, looking at the same place from radically different and irreconcilable perspectives.
An-My Lê: New York Times, October 27, 2020. L: St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, Washington D.C., 2020 R: Oval Office Set, ‘Saturday Night Live,’ NBC Studios, New York, N.Y., 2018
This week I found myself on the grounds of the White House. It was a drizzly, dreary morning. Dug up sections of the lawn adjacent to a lineup of broadcast tents appeared like graves. A theater of the real. I photographed Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is all about work, in his Capitol office. On his coffee table lay a biography of the “Silent General,” Ulysses S. Grant.
An-My Lê: New York Times, October 27, 2020. L: Sugar Cane Field, November 5, Houma, Louisiana, 2016 R: Cars along the Rio Grande, U.S.-Mexico border, Ojinaga, Mexico, 2019.
There are many types of power and means of taking measure of the powerful. Many of my photographs are made out of a profound sense of powerlessness but also out of a desire to locate power and authority in unexpected places: in the natural world, in a solitary border patrol officer or in the intimacy and strength of a family under a bridge that connects the United States to Mexico. These images are reminders to me that our American landscape and the communities within it transcend this cultural and political moment.
An-My Lê: New York Times, October 27, 2020. L: U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer, Presidio-Ojinaga International Bridge. R: Mexico Customs and Border Protection Officer, Presidio-Ojinaga International Bridge. Ojinaga, Mexico. Both 2019
An-My Lê was a 2012 MacArthur fellow, and a survey of her work is at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, through January. She teaches photography at Bard College. You can see the entire “A Photographer’s American Road Trip” on the New York Times website by clicking here.
LTI_Lightside has been working with An-My Lê since 2018.
Corey, Donna, Jane, Daphne, Giuliana, Ever, Jochem, Eric, Chris, unknown, and myself is an exhibition of portraits taken from 1995-2019 by Talia Chetrit. Spanning several decades these eight photographs move us across an uncanny breadth of staged and unstaged portraits— a test photo from a fashion shoot, a portrait of a body-cast from an ancient archeological site dated 79AD, self-portraits in the artist’s home, legendary muses backstage. The edit of these photos for the participatory space of the gallery functions as an analog to the contemporary conditions of image-making and image-viewing, a grouping for which a single time-stamp can open our curiosity, and also lay flat against a network of unrelated meanings, both within the exhibition itself and within photography itself.
Talia Chetrit: from Corey, Donna, Jane, Daphne, Giuliana, Ever, Jochem, Eric, Chris, unknown, and myself, Sies + Höke, 2019/2010 L: Self Portrait (Mesh Layer) 2019: 32 x 48 archival pigment print / dibond mounting R: Ever, Cory Tippin Make Up, 2018: 10 x 14 archival pigment print / dibond mounting
This is the forth exhibition of Chetrit’s work we’ve helped produce for Sies + Höke. We’ve been working with Talia since 2009.
For more on our projects with Talia click here For more on Talia with Sies + Höke click here