tête-à-tête

David Castillo Gallery presents “tête-à-tête”, a group show on view from November 28, 2016 until January 31, 2017: the curator Mickalene Thomas, who is also one of the artists presented in the exhibition, has brought together fourteen photographers and video artists working on the theme of the “black body” and specifically aspects of its social and political implications.

Different points of view, many contributions, perspectives and experiences converge in this exhibition which showcases the great power of the image in an attempt to change our perspective on the subject portrayed in it.

In “Portrait of Sidra Sitting”, curator Mickalene Thomas presents the black body in a provocative way, challenging all the competitive and representative canons of female subjects portrayed by great artists of the past, as in Manet’s “Olympia”.

At the same time, the works of Lyle Ashton Harris, who selected a series of pictures from his 1986-1996 archive, show us subjects belonging to the activism of the gay rights movement at the end of the last century: these pictures, as in “Gail and Alex, San Francisco, 1992”, give to the observer a viewpoint from the bottom up that highlights the characters and monumentalizes them.

In the same way, the work of all the others artists involved in the exhibition reveals the ability of photography and video to create a link between the photographer, the subject and the viewer, allowing a personal interpretation of the reality represented.