And if it's true—as journalists and some politicians will have us believe—that we are inhabiting an era of “post-truth,” isn’t it the artist's role to re-frame truth not as the way things are or have always been, but as potential prayers for what should be?
INTIMATE FICTIONS,
featuring photography by Alexis Martino, A. R. Havel, and Meg Turner
Whether it was to distance itself from the abstraction of the brush-stroke, or prop itself up as the ultimate medium of documentation and evidence, photography as a discipline has historically embraced labels of “objectivity” and “truth.” Of course, there have been artists who have made strong aesthetic reprisals of this position: surrealists like Claude Cahun; the proto-Vogue aesthete Cecil Beaton; Diane Arbus. In “Intimate Fictions,” Gryder exhibits Alexis Martino A.R. Havel, and Meg Turner: three photographers who toe the line of truth and fiction, the personal and the public, all while creating their own distinct realities through ritual image-making.
Intimacy is inherent to the images: for one, each artist is photographing their immediate friends, community, lovers, and chosen-family. Additionally, there is an affinity of hand-work involved: alternative processes of photogravure, silk-screening, traditional dark-room processes, adornment and decoration. And if it's true—as journalists and some politicians will have us believe—that we are inhabiting an era of “post-truth,” isn’t it the artist's role to re-frame truth not as the way things are or have always been, but as potential prayers for what should be? Here’s what should be: eroticism, transmutation, wondrous collisions, the just-out-of-focus, the kitsch, and the cast-aside.
Alexis Martino includes work from 101 Pennies,presenting her community to express feelings of loss, desire, and eroticism, while creating fantastical human-animal hybrids. Her photographs are silver gelatin darkroom prints that she sepia tones and frames within a changing grid of 101 images.
A.R.Havel presents work of meta-narratives: a group of queer punks in the 1980s rehearsing a play based on his universally unread novella about an 18th century casta painter. Hint: the “queer punks” may actually be people you know. His work references Brechtian theater and liturgical dioramas of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Meg Turner includes new works that synthesize her processes of photographic tin types, photogravure, and screenprinting. Inspired by visual iconographies of the past, such as postcards and memento pictures, Turner recreates images of similar ilk to produce artwork that is undeniably present and even monumental.
