Sliding between photography/video and sculpture/installation, Raquel Paiewonsky builds allegorical s
Sliding between photography/video and sculpture/installation, Raquel Paiewonsky builds allegorical scenarios that reveal an intimate connection between the body—specifically the female body—and the natural world. Breasts become vessels, hands become roots, eyes become pools of water. “Instead of working the physical and aesthetic image of women, which has always played a fundamental role in the visual history of humanity… I explore a more psychological and intellectual place, using images that display our plurality as gender and species,” she has said. Paiewonsky is particularly attuned to physical properties of indexicality, as a way of drawing connections between bodies and materials without doing so literally; in this image, for example, we read the hands and their inverse, the gloves, against a stretch of sand that bears the imprints of the woman’s feet. Her projects operate on multiple levels, the most accessible being their exquisite formalism; this photograph is beautiful and haunting, absurd and relatable at the same time. Paiewonsky’s strategy works because this visual allure guides us to a more profound, unresolved place in which questions of agency arise. The women in her tableaux negotiate between dissolution into nature and control over its materials and forms. In tandem with this they negotiate a tension between what is man-made and what is natural, often with their bodies themselves. Whether we read them as precarious or empowered, however, the most pressing offering of Paiewonsky’s work is its (arguably feminist) suggestion that the relationship between humans and nature be dehierarchized, and that women hold the answers to achieving such a thing.Raquel Paiewonsky, Dunes, 2014 -- source link
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