'Dream photography' is the apt title for the exhibition that opened yesterday at Madrid's relatively new Camara Oscura gallery. The group show features the work of Maria Castello, Ted Partin and Damian Ucieda, three young photographers whose respective artistic preoccupations present a contemporary wish for what the truth of the medium could be, more with the art of lying than with the truth. They are artists who belong to a new post-Crewdson generation, making images a far cry from photography's historically fact-centric appearance and bent for the documentary, one that is less concerned with truth and more with personal truth-construction.
Maria Castello.
Maria Castello (b. 1979, Madrid) makes images of contemporary spaces that at first appear to be empty but that on closer look are filled with a constant sense of, well, absence. Whether they are public places such as parking lots, endless hallways or private storage attics, her work gives the viewer a sort of pause to linger on the intangible moments in between being and doing and between the intimate and the banal. Castello was recently selected for an award by INJUVE in Spain.
Ted Partin.
Ted Partin's work was one of the highlights of last year's 'Regeneration. 50 photographers of tomorrow', the Aperture Foundation's book and traveling selection of emerging names in the field. Partin (b. 1977, New York) works within the constraints and transforming power of traditional black and white photography to create a set of characters that are both old and new - retro-tinged ambiguously gendered young hipsters.
Damian Ucieda.
Damian Ucieda (La Coruña, Spain, 1980) makes work that takes its cue from cinema's construction of physical and psychological space. His staged photos depict close-ups of figures in the middle of 'scenes', eg, parking a car, in moments of quiet contemplation, as if more concerned with a 'truer' world found elsewhere, somewhere outside and beyond the photograph's frame.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
'DREAM PHOTOGRAPHY'
To 28 July 2007.
camara oscura galeria de arte
Calle Alameda, 16
28014 Madrid
T: +34 91 429 17 34
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