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(untitled
#)
is our first collaborative
project. It began as a response to a critique of our independent work given
by an influential artist/critic/curator based in NYC. During separate studio
visits we each received the same response: “As with most women who turn
the camera on themselves, the work is overburdened with emotion.” This
critique sent us on a search for our place as artists and individuals within
the art world and within photographic history. What was originally a visual
investigation became (untitled #).
(untitled
# ) is
composed of several interrelated series: Hysteria Collection, Pose
Archive, Anthology of Trends, Personal Catalogue, Studies
of Light and Form, Cast of Characters, Referential Index,
and Aftermath. Each segment of this project is a layer that further
uncovers its meaning. The project is rooted in the language of the archive
and the dialectic of performance. We enact and record a deconstructive
visual analysis, shifting our scrutiny from art institution to artist to art
object to audience. Through our performances we offer a perspective from
each of these positions as well as the opportunity to reconsider them. We
expose the rhetoric underlying representational strategies and question
their relationship to history and contemporary culture. We invite the viewer
to assess, not merely consume, the motifs recurring in contemporary art, its
framework, and its presentation.
In
Hysteria Collection we look back to the beginnings of the
representation of women, to the constructed documentation of the sick
Victorian woman. This simulated
hysterical condition and the constructed image of the sickly woman was
devised to prove an invented feminine affliction. We perform the hysterical
body drawn from its historical context and place it in a contemporary
context to resurface the historical reference as well as uncover the
formulas that yield the recurring contemporary images of women.
In
Anthology of Trends we
perform the contemporary trends we find in the representation of women by
other women, and we exchange roles as photographer and model.
We present each trend in diptychs, with each of us being model in
turn to prevent the viewer from consuming the image at face value. This
doubling creates a literal double-take and encourages the viewer to think
twice about the conditions and the context in which the woman’s body is
positioned and presented beyond the traditional aesthetics of light and
form.
In
Light and Form, inspired
by technical trends and camera user manuals of the 1970’s and 1980’s, we
consider trends of photographic technique that have been used throughout
photographic history as justification for, or distraction from, the
objectified representation of women by men. In donning the unitard, we seek
to neutralize the female form as a point of sexual desire. Employing
Photoshop, we mimic the visual styling of images from this period including
soft focus, hand coloring, airbrush, and the application of Vaseline around
the edges.
As
“collaborative / women / minority” artists, we continuously explore the
sameness and difference within the construct of identity, and the role and
meaning of signifiers. We work with self-portraiture addressing issues of
gender, body, and representation within various sociological contexts,
engaged in the process of photography as performance. We investigate the
role and identity of the artist, and that of photography, within the
socio-cultural context and the art world.
Tarrah Krajnak
was born in Lima, Peru. Adopted
by Czech-American parents, she grew up in Ohio. In 2004, Tarrah received an
MFA in Photography from the University of Notre Dame, and she is now based
in Winooski, Vermont, where she teaches Photography in the Art Department at
the University of Vermont, Burlington. Wilka
Roig was born and raised in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. She moved to
Ithaca, New York in 1995 and received her MFA in Photography from Cornell
University in 2005. Wilka still lives in Ithaca, where she teaches
Photography in the Department of Art at Cornell University.
Collaboratively, they have exhibited
nationally at such venues as The National Museum of Women in the Arts,
Washington, DC; San Francisco Camerawork; the Pingyao International
Photography Festival, China; and at the galleries at Johnson State College
in VT, the University of Toledo in OH, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and
the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK.
In 2008, they were recipients of artists grants from the Vermont
Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Cornell
Council for the Arts. Tarrah and Wilka were artists-in residence at CPW in
2008.
For more information please visit www.tarrahwilka.com.
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