IRENE CAESAR: A NEW HISTORY OF IDEAS IN PICTURES, SOLO SHOW, THE ORENSANZ FOUNDATION (2009)
Please join us for Irene Caesar's Opening Reception
Thursday, November 5 between 6 and 10 pm
Artscape Gallery
Angel Orensanz Foundation
172 Norfolk St., NY, NY 10002
Telephone: 212-529-7194
The exhibition is open until November 27, M-Fr 10-6,
on Sat-Sun by appointment only.
For more information please visit the artist's website.
“I only do staged photography, even if I shoot on location. I believe that reality is a creation of collective and individual consciousness, and the two-dimensional ready-mades of everyday existence are simply a thin illusory surface hiding the reality where people truly dwell.
My goal is to create images of performances that make people live in front of the camera in a more intense way than how they live in their everyday lives. In this sense, my staged photography is a counter-staged photography. And that is why my images are not simply movie stills, which are the artificial and mannerist cuts from externalized action. I define my style as theatre of absurd documented by photographic means.
The project “A New History of Ideas in Pictures” includes works done in the studio in the form of absurd performances. Each image is a part of a set of images (usually 3 to 5), which represents the entire continuous performance. The overall objective of the project is to evaluate the major concepts of human civilization, like human nature, the origin of man, universal good and evil, the Divine Father and the Divine Mother, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the bestial, race, gender and its ambiguities, ego and alter-ego, fetish, super-hero, objectification of women, modes of mass consciousness like modes of seriality and patriarchal domination, modes of inferiority and suffering, and the attitudes towards death.” - Irene Caesar
Prints are on loan from Dr. Norton T. Dodge, President of the Cremona Foundation and donor, along with wife Nancy, of the Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Please RSVP for the November 5 opening by hitting REPLY to this e-mail. Thank you and we are looking forward to seeing you.
Image: Irene Caesar, Contribution to Abstract Expressionism (2009)