STRANGER SELF
Stranger Self, which is curated by Gallery CA Curatorial Interns, Haley Palmore and Joseph Shaikewitz, presents the work of four artists who approach the stranger through a variety of lenses: Nancy Daly, Jackie Milad, Benoit Paillé, and Laura Payne.
For some of these artists, the relationship with their subject is brief. Jackie Milad relies on short encounters to create an encyclopedic range of human expressions, creating a ‘type’ figure which results from numerous documentations of faces from calculated interactions. Benoit Paillé too meets briefly with the subject of his photographs. Allowing them to take their own self-portraits, Paillé puts his subjects in his own role as the artist while exploring how strangers desire to present themselves — of all of his series, he finds these works to be the most spontaneous and likewise contemporary. Then come the artists who draw upon their unknown subject as strangers themselves. Laura Payne pulls her imagery of before and after plastic surgery patients from the internet, never contacting those who become the subject of her works. The paintings, which present two selves at once, provide a look at these strangers’ sense of public identity. Through a non-figural exploration, Nancy Daly gathers her subjects from the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. Channeling the obscure encounters with serendipitous hopes, she reveals, from a distance, the process of private thoughts becoming public acts both in the pieces’ creation and its manipulation.
The shifting temporality of today’s relationships can reveal just as much about how we communicate and coexist as it can about one particular subject. As the four artists in Stranger Self reveal, these encounters can range in terms of length, proximity, intimacy, and a number of other factors. At the same time, each artist exercises a unique way of both presenting and representing their ‘stranger’ subject, consequently giving the viewers a look into these artists’ assumptions and manifestations of these strangers. While day-by-day and decade-by-decade, relationships continue to change, Stranger Self provides a snapshot into contemporary encounters and the variety of means through which they evolve into works of art.
