NEW YORK, NY.- C24 Gallery announced the opening of their exhibition, On the Inside: Portraiture Through Photography, featuring the work of Lisa Crafts, Laura Heyman, Pixy Liao, Sven Marquardt and Marie Tomanova. This body of work by an international assembling of photographers encompassing cultural backgrounds and content from Germany, China, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Haiti and the US, offers a collection of images borne of deeply personal connections, resulting in intimate and revealing portraits from around the globe. The exhibition is on view through Thursday, December 24th, 2020.
The artists featured in On the Inside each realize their images through distinctive versions of an insider’s perspective. Lisa Crafts spends months investigating the worlds of the environmental and social justice activists, thinkers and dreamers at the center of her animated portraits, personally sourcing natural and technological elements, such as small animals that are lovingly photographed and released back into their natural habitats with gratitude. Although the images of her subjects set against individualized backdrops may reference traditional Renaissance style portraits featuring persons seated with bucolic landscapes and symbolic elements in the background, her use of modern digital animation technology brings to life the details of their worlds in surprising and insightful ways.
Laura Heyman has spent over a decade building strong relationships with residents of the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As an outsider in a country with a complicated history, she has imbued her long-term, ongoing portraiture project, Don’t Move Again, with a mission to upend the traditional roles between photographer and subject, rendering her as more of a conduit than a controlling voice. In a collaborative process that centers her subjects as creative directors of their own images, she has offered a platform for expression that is designed to be a joyful experience for those community members, artists, aid workers and politicians who work with her to imbue their own images with their unique voices.
Pixy Liao’s series, Experimental Relationship, ongoing since 2007, is an examination of the traditional roles assigned to partners in a heterosexual couple. Using herself and her boyfriend Moro as the subjects, she challenges expectations, as they explore notions of what is normal in the expression of a romantic bond between a man and a woman. As Pixy is Chinese and Moro is Japanese, her work also pokes at their cultural differences and the ethnic stereotypes related to their countries of origin.
Sven Marquardt is famed throughout Berlin as a notorious nightclub bouncer and gatekeeper at the world-famous Berghain. As a photographer, he has a history of chronicling the intense subculture of the German Democratic Republic in East Berlin in the 80s. Since then, Marquardt has amassed a body of intensely provocative yet intimate black and white portraits of the denizens of Berlin nightlife. In these selections from his series, Rudel, Marquardt goes beyond the intimidating exteriors of the bouncers who guard the doors of Germany’s nightclubs to glimpse their inner workings with the kind of nuanced understanding that only comes with a deep, personal solidarity.
Marie Tomanova has been widely celebrated for her ongoing series, Young American, first presented as a solo exhibition at Czech Center New York in 2018. The collection encompasses a diverse body of young Americans with a raw and penetrating honesty. The side of youth culture that Tomanova represents is a generation not bound by gender conventions. Instead, the young people in her images redefine notions of individuality, identity, and belonging in the American social landscape, epitomizing the isolation and disconnection that nonetheless binds a new generation in their otherness.
