Drape uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. I sought out images, mainly from the 1960s, in which women posed in (semi) domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes. Manipulating these, I extended the curtains to partially obscure the women, re-enforcing the former’s role as a marker between public and private. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter. The background, meanwhile, envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background.
The pictures in Drape make no attempt to look ‘real’. Sections of the images are blurred that would normally be in focus; the gaze of the viewer is deflected and redirected, putting an overlooked part of the image in the spotlight. However, the presence of the model still teases the viewer into scrutinizing the picture.
The square images submitted all derive from original medium format negatives; the rest of the (rectangular) images are derived from the 1960s men’s magazine Cavalcade and retain their original size and layout in relation to the magazine page.
Eva Stenram is a London-based visual artist who is interested in photography as a medium of inconstancy and transformation. Incorporating digitally manipulated pictures, found photographs and images from the Internet, her work comments on our complex relationship with the photographic image, our relationship with surveillance culture and our relationship with privacy. Stenram seeks to unsettle the original functions of our society’s familiar photographic genres.
Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003, Stenram has exhibited internationally; she has been included in shows at the V&A Museum (UK), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea), Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (India) and Zendai Museum of Modern Art (China). In 2012, Stenram was nominated for the Les Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award. In 2013, she has solo exhibitions at Ravestijn Gallery (Amsterdam) and Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool).
FESTIVAL
Hyères, International Festival of Fashion and Photography
April 26 – 29, 2013
Villa Noailles
83400 Hyères
France
