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New York : Dress-Up, Group Exhibition

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sepiaEYE gallery presents Dress-Up, a group exhibition in which costume, performance, persona, and pose are explored through the lens of photographers Qiana MestrichPhyllis Galembo and Charan Singh.

Qiana Mestrich’s series Namesake and Inherited Patterns cleverly expands on the artist’s exploration of her namesake, Qiana®: a silk-like nylon fabric made by the DuPont Experimental Company in 1968. The fabric became fashionable in the 1970s as a popular choice for disco attire and in turn, through heavy marketing, the name was adopted for many young African American girls born in the years to follow. Mestrich visited the archives of DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, selecting vintage fashion marketing materials featuring Qiana®.

The resulting images from Inherited Patterns (2014) combine these vintage photographs with fragments of mug shot photos of other women named Qiana.
It was for an earlier series, Namesake (2013) that Mestrich began to look at these mug shots of predominantly Black and Latino women who share her first name, Qiana. Inspired by Allan Sekula’s essay “The Body and the Archive,” Mestrich questions the instrumental use of the camera to identify and control “the criminal body” with the mug shot being its most effective method.

Namesake was created by re-photographing the web-resolution mug shots sourced online. The “photographs of photographs” result in nebulous images with brutal but beautiful colors that metaphorically reference violence. The women’s faces become abstracted and reduced to just their skin color and become a ghostlike presence, drawing attention to issues of racial profiling and violation of privacy.

Phyllis Galembo’s recent series records the actors of the Ramlila in Ramnagar and throughout Varanasi, India. The Ramlila, or “Rama’s play,” is a dramatic re-enactment of the life of Rama, which ends in ten-day battle between Rama and Ravana as described in the Hindu religious epic, the Ramayana. The enactment of the story in Ramnagar attracts thousands of visitors to Varanasi, and, with the use of big sets, costumes, and amateur actors from the area—some of who are the latest generation to play those roles—the whole city is transformed into a big open-air stage.

As a chronicler of the transformative use of costume in parades, religious and holiday rituals for over thirty years, Galembo was naturally drawn to document the Ramlila in her inimitable style. With the aid of intricate costumes, whimsically painted papier-mâché masks, and ornate make up, her subjects fully inhabit their roles as the gods and goddesses of the Ramlila.

Charan Singh, born in India and based in London, introduces us to a world of Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others. Kothis (effeminate, underprivileged, homosexual men), Hijras (eunuchs), and Giriyas (partners of kothis and hijras) are indigenous terms used by queer working class and transgendered men, in their own dialect, to define their particular sexual identities. While India’s photographic history is disproportionately rich with documentation of the most privileged classes and castes, the subjects on which Singh chose to focus his lens were never a part of this formal visual history of India.
Outside of their representation as victims of the HIV and AIDS crises, Singh’s subjects had never been given the opportunity to express themselves as they chose to be portrayed. The bold, confident personas and poses they adopt and the clothing they choose to represent themselves are usually inspired by Bollywood, the most readily available cinema and television to members of the Indian lower-class.

EXHIBITION
Dress-Up
Qiana Mestrich, Phyllis Galembo and Charan Singh
From March 24th to April 30th, 2016
sepiaEYE gallery
547 West 27th Street, #608
New York, NY 10001
United States
[email protected]
http://www.sepiaeye.com
http://www.qianamestrich.com
http://www.galembo.com
http://www.charansinghphotography.com

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