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subscribe to style file blog via RSSSeeing Isn’t Always Believing
August 3, 2009 10:33 am
In fashion we’re so accustomed to the roles dress, makeup, and other external adornments play in transforming ourselves that we often don’t give the concepts second thought. But for the 11 emerging photographers in Identity Identities (i/i), an exhibit on view through August 26 at New York’s Aperture Gallery, frippery and material ostentation are carefully dissected to challenge definitions surrounding the body and subjectivity. From Jennifer Lee’s fragmented portraits evoking fashion illustration and paper dolls, to Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s images of the unmanicured other side of prep school life, to Kelly Clark’s records of suburban houses that appear nondescript until the accompanying captions recount murders that happened within their walls, the artworks walk the line between aesthetic perfection and morbid perversity. But there’s a sense of humor at play, as well. In the series produced by one of our personal favorites, Style.com’s senior photo researcher and photographer Nicola Kast, the artist uses self-portraiture to explore her own German national identity. As the 27-year-old transforms from a bourgeois hausfrau in deep red lipstick and pearls to the ultimate dictator himself in army green and a shrunken mustache, one gets the idea that what appears on the surface at first glance is not always what it seems.
tags: Jennifer Lee, Kelly Clark, Nicola Kast, Victoria Hely-Hutchinson
