Harriet Casdin-Silver: Self Portraits

David Prifti: Collodion Portraits

June 6 - July 11 at Gallery NAGA

The first posthumous exhibition of the doyenne of holography is paired with breakout work by a mid-career photographer.

Harriet Casdin-Silver: Self-Portraits and David Prifti: Collodion Portraits both run from June 6 through July 11 at Gallery NAGA.  A public reception will be held at the gallery on Friday, June 6 from 6 to 8 pm.

On March 9, 2008 Harriet Casdin-Silver died following a short, intense bout with pneumonia.  Informed of the damage to her system and the likelihood that she could not function independently, the 83-year old artist asked her family to let her go.

Acclaimed internationally as the most significant figure in the field of holography, Casdin-Silver was a pioneer for forty years, responsible for technical innovations during the medium’s infancy in the 1960s and for the introduction of provocative subject matter throughout the ensuing decades.  Her vigorous feminism informed her work, which often sought, through its exploration of the human body and our sexuality, to liberate its viewers from our inhibitions and our limited perception of our own possibilities.

In its late 2007 Collection Highlight: Harriet Casdin-Silver, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts presented three works it owns.  Its curator, Nick Capasso, wrote of Casdin-Silver as “the world’s most important holographic artist.”

Before her illness, Casdin-Silver had planned two exhibitions with Gallery NAGA, the current show of self-portraits and a show of new work for 2009, which will now include two new, unexhibited works with others drawn from her studio inventory.  The current show presents six self-portraits from 1992 through 2007 including both the epochal 70+1+2 (1998), a double naked self-portrait, front view and back view, shot, respectively, in her seventy-first and seventy-second years and 80+1 (2007), a digital self-portrait shot a decade later.

Also included are Corpse with Tie (1992) and Corpse with Weeds (1992), two works in which the naked Casdin-Silver is laid out, both in genuine anticipation of her own inevitable death and in a playacting mockery of our inevitable, overly serious response.

David Prifti is not unknown or emerging.  His work was shown by and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1990s.  Since then he has transformed his photographic work twice.  First he moved from the quasi-documentary reportage MoMA showed to an obsessive reprinting of black-and-white portraits of family members present and past on sculptural objects such as hubcaps, architectural fragments, and scraps of steel.  This was the work for which Prifti was best known in recent years.

Since 2005 he has developed a new process, albeit one popular in the 19th century.  Shooting with large-format wet-plate collodion emulsions on glass, Prifti has been making tintype portraits of students, friends, and acquaintances.  In a statement, Prifti explains his attraction to these materials.  “The fine detail and tonal beauty of the wet plate process allow me to describe my subjects in more powerful ways than I am able to achieve with contemporary materials,” he writes.

He has applied this approach to several groups of portrait subjects, including students he teaches at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School and a community of “suspension” people, whose decorations of their bodies with studs and piercings are sometimes the anchors for hanging themselves suspended in the air.  In both series, Prifti and his subjects collaborate in sittings of up to two minutes.  “That’s the place it starts,” he says.  “There’s a certain energy, a certain tension to get at some truth, some moment of psychological complexity.”

Twenty-seven images of Prifti’s work are also currently on exhibition in The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, up through August 17 at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.