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| © Marisa Portolese, Carnations (A Mother's Tears) |
fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.
Today we continue the series with responses from Charles Guice.
We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford, S. Billie Mandle, Leslie K. Brown, Gordon Stettinius, Marc Feustel, Hin Chua, Adriana Rios Monsalve, Daniel Augschoell, Larissa Leclair, Elinor Carucci, Pieter Wisse, Daniel Echevarría, Natalie Minik, Qiana Mestrich, Jason Landry, Rona Chang, Stella Kramer, Joanne Lukitsh, Yumi Goto, Gwen Lafage, Heidi Romano, Julie Grahame, Stefano Bianchi and Steve Bisson.
Respondent: Charles Guice is the director of Charles Guice Contemporary, specializing in contemporary photography, film/video and new media by nationally and internationally recognized visual artists. Recognized for developing new talent as well as for advancing more established artists, he has been instrumental in the careers of several of today's leading contemporary artists, including Erika Diettes, Birthe Piontek, Hank Willis Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems.
Since establishing his eponymous gallery in 2002, Guice has placed works in prominent private and public collections throughout the United States and abroad, including The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The High Museum of Art, The International Center of Photography and The Williams College Museum of Art.
A former healthcare executive, he has served on the Boards of Trustees for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and Oakland, and The Museum of the African Diaspora, and was also a founding member of the nominating committee for the Aperture West Book Prize.
Guice has curated a number of exhibitions throughout the U.S., including We’re All in This Together, If It Ain’t Broke, Four Women and American Icons, and is Managing Director and co-curator for Photo Miami. He has been an invited juror and frequent portfolio reviewer at En Foco (New York), Review Santa Fe, Atlanta Celebrates Photography and FotoFest (Houston), and will serve as a curator for Discoveries of the Meeting Place at the 2012 FotoFest Biennial.
Selections: Lorena Guillén Vaschetti and Marisa Portolese
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| © Lorena Guillén Vaschetti, Untitled #8 |
Lorena Guillén Vaschetti
To what extent do photographs shape memory? Is family history subject to being re-imagined when large portions fall undocumented?
Lorena Guillén Vaschetti's series Secretos de Familia (Family Secrets) fuses the idea of memory with family photos and stories. The series—at once intimate in its simplicity—is comprised solely of a set of images of slides, film canisters and notes her mother had intended to discard. We never learn the secrets they hold. And Vaschetti, challenging the viewer to consider his or her own family histories, chooses smartly not to clue us in.
Vaschetti's work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, South America and Europe, and is included in a number of public and private collections. Her first monograph, Historia, Memoria, Silencios, published by Schilt, will be available in October in the UK, in November in Continental Europe, and in January in the U.S.
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| © Lorena Guillén Vaschetti, Untitled #3 |
Marisa Portolese
The rich, color photographs in Marisa Portolese's latest series, Antonia's Garden, are exquisitely seductive. We are immediately inveigled by the lushness of the images; is it her subjects' gaze, their pose, or the evocative settings she chooses to photograph them in?
Drawing on a body of work Portolese began several years ago, the largely autobiographical series probes the fragility of life through the lens of family-related themes. Each photograph—with input from the artist's family members—is staged as a formal portrait depicting a family dynamic, while the sophisticated settings reference traditional portraiture, landscape and still life as underlying narrative. The resulting work is a deeply personal treatise on loss, love, and self-identity within a family—one that could easily mirror our own.
Marisa Portolese's work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, Europe and the United States. Born in Montréal, her photographs have been published in several monographs on her work, and have also been featured in numerous books, journals and magazines. A monograph of images from Antonia's Garden will be published next year by UMA.
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| © Marisa Portolese, A Descent into the Maelström |