Baxter St, in partnership with YoungArts, presents a solo exhibition by Zayira Ray (2018 YoungArts Winner in Photography), featuring a lens-based collection of portraiture that explore notions of belonging, love, and kinship in Brown diasporic communities. The culmination of her 2024 YoungArts Baxter St Residency, this presentation showcases a new iteration of an evolving body of work spanning several years.
The Indian-American artist documents her subjects against hand-painted canvas backdrops, capturing moments of tender intimacy. These constructed canvases act as sanctuaries, in which Ray expands her lens-based practice, envisioning new ways of forging connection. “Here, the photographic backdrop, associated with traditional portraiture, evolves into a vehicle for reconciliation,” she says. “As layers of paint intertwine, so too do the cultural narratives of past, present, and future.”
Romantic couples, familial units, tight knit friends – the subjects in Ray’s images span generations, genders, and national origins, and yet they all share the bonds and burdens of global modernity. Ray’s images are both staged and candid. She has trained her lens on the nuanced and layered relations that form in Brown communities spread throughout the world by choice or by force. In doing so, this body of work celebrates Brownness amidst widespread societal narratives of subjugation and fearmongering.
In many pieces, the artist explores in-between moments, capturing rekindled moments of joy and belonging, reconciling with what is lost in migration. As Ray says, “I seek to navigate this duality – acknowledging the shared grief of displacement, while also celebrating the resilience and interconnectedness of our shared experiences.”
In the Palestine Tapestry Project, the canvas backdrop is reimagined as a vehicle for community-building in the face of profound loss and displacement. Ray documents two groups of four Palestinian-American women as they create their own canvas “tapestry” with the guidance of art therapist Rana Abdallah. The work acts as an embodiment of Palestinian community, solidarity, and remembrance in response to widespread censorship and erasure. The tapestry hangs down an entire gallery wall, accompanied by three portrait photographs and a short film that documents the process of the canvas coming alive. The tapestry is not only a physical artifact, but also a lifeform that weaves together threads of memory, identity, and resistance. With each indelible marking – Who wins in war? Where do we go from here? – the lifecycle of the canvas stands as an honoring of Palestinian existence.
Ray’s work is a testament to the creative potential of lens-based media in exploring the social and political upheavals that transform relationships within Brown communities across the globe. Demonstrating that collective empowerment can be cultivated in the process of intimate image making, in this vibrant body of work, Ray pulls together the threads that have been frayed by the drift of diasporas across time and space.
Zayira Ray (b. 2000, New York City) is an Indian-American portrait photographer and artist. Rooted in themes of love, community, and belonging, Ray’s portraits span culture, religion, and socioeconomic strata, highlighting diverse and soulful visual stories from all walks of life. Her commitment to exploring the un-represented, the under-represented, and the mis-represented has led to the creation of arresting and ethereal portraits, devoid of convention and rich with a vivid wonder.
Ray’s work encompasses the realms of contemporary portraiture, classical representation, and mythology, with a keen interest in stories from the South Asian diaspora. Through the intersections of gazes – particularly between herself as a brown woman and with those of her subjects – she documents stories of love, heritage, and sacred bonds, exploring the ebbs and flows of human connection: relationships both familial and familiar, potent and gentle. By constructing tangible “safe spaces” that serve as refuge from the outside world, her photographs highlight our interior spaces: sensibilities and aesthetics, fantasies and desires, moments of both solitude and solace, and the preservation of self.
Ray’s photographs have been published in Vogue India, Vogue Magazine, The New York Times, ELLE, People Magazine,Architectural Digest, and ESSENCE, and exhibited at PHILLIPS Auction House, MoMa PS1, and Photoville, among others. She has received recognition and awards from YoungArts, the Dedalus Foundation, and NASDAQ. Ray is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts in Photography & Imaging.
Zayira Ray : Interthread
March 27, 2024 – April 24, 2024
Baxter St. Camera Club of New York
126 Baxter St
New York NY 10013
www.baxterst.org
