Faces + Traces

May 16, 2018

What’s in a face — what is it, really? Some holes, some circles, a bit of hair, a sprinkling of lines, some skin, some bone, some muscle.

What’s in a painting — what is it, really? Some globs, some slashes, a sprinkling of lines, some canvas, some color, some texture.

Trude Viken’s mesmerizing new works at Fortnight Institute effortlessly beg these questions with a combination of humor and horror. Her anonymous portraits are both clownish and skeletal, depicted as they are in textural whimsies of thickly applied pigment.

It’s as if she is pulling the abstract into the figurative, or vice versa, ever aware of the physical reality of the paint and its capabilities of rendering illusion — and, as a result, has created a ghostly limbo from which her characters grin out at us. They seem to laugh, or plea — their skin is made of pockmarked paint, but their emotions still resonate across the distance of Viken’s veil.

Text by John Martin Tilley
Images coutesty of Fortnight Institute

Faces and Traces will be on view through June 17th at Fortnight Institute.

Art

A Love Letter to Naples

This month, from Paris Photo to Spazio Maiocchi to New York, Lloyd will launch his new project with an exhibition featuring a selection of the deliciously photo-dense, black-and-white book.

To coincide with the book launch, Brett will be launching specially designed t-shirts to promote local businesses, 100% of the proceeds of which will go to support the non-profit organisation "Friends of Naples" for the restoration of the city's historic structures. The t-shirts will be made by the Naples design team Vienmnsuonno1926.

The book was photographed over four summers, starting in 2018. It was refreshing to take my time, great to work on a project that would be ready when it’s ready. Coming from the fashion photography industry we are used to tight deadlines. This was the opposite. Pasquale Nappi became my muse who I would shoot each Summer, we would work on images together, some spontaneous as we were having a day on the rocks whilst others such as with the golden face portrait we would plan in advance.

My limited Neapolitan meant that a lot of the portraits were achieved with little to no dialogue between us, so the beauty in those shots for me are the peoples own creative input, their instinctive posing and glances at the camera. Full of soul. I am an obsessive of archaeology and ancient history, I’m in my element along the bay of Naples. From the ancient baths at Baia, along Posillipo to Pompei and even Paestum, it was a joy to learn and develop my technique of landscapes and still life, just me, my Rolleifelx and the ancient Roman and ~Greek fragments of those civilisations.

Art

Life in Debt

The enigmatic, edging on eerie culmination of imagery spans four years of documentation and conversations that began as an offshoot of Regan's professional practice but ultimately was interwoven with his personal life and experiences.

During isolation in 2020, I was stuck in New York and my composer was stuck in Paris and our window out was sharing this piece back and forth daily, coming up with a cadence visually and sonically that honored the intimacy and then timeliness of the material. It was a cathartic process to reflect on the past that I had unintentionally captured, while there seemed to be so many unknowns. Revisiting the film rolls, gave me an overwhelming sense of gratitude, I was humbled and felt so grateful to had shared and captured these moments over the last few years.

Once the travel bans had lifted I came home, Venice where I grew up, unsure of what I was coming back to, I got on my bike and started documenting the remnants of who and what was left. But the effects of recent events wouldn’t truly show themselves until later, friends started passing away, problems like mental health and addiction were amplified, the people that I loved were struggling, but we are also so resilient. This piece is a testament to human condition and how being with one another and how community is key to survival. That year my best childhood friend Ronnie would pass on his 37th birthday, the film and book are dedicated to him.

Visually centred around the final bike ride I took with his older brother upon my return back home prior to Ronnie’s passing. The piece also includes light therapy where we intentionally used waves of intense blues and red film burns combined with sound, to wash over the viewer, inviting them to enter into a space of introspection.

Debt is solely meant to be viewed only in a physical space, I felt strongly that it does everyone involved a disservice to live online, my hope is to tour the book and film across different cities, starting in Europe and working my way back to the states.

See Regan's film for 'Life in Debt', below.

Art

I Wash You Dry

The book was shot between Jamaica and her home in Brooklyn, New York. The book is Burnett's second to be published by Dashwood, and began production shortly after her first book, Cabin Fever, released.

Escape in our preview of the kalediscopic imagery, nude portraits and symmetric reflections of I Wash You Dry.