FESTIVAL FOTOLEGGENDO 2011

GAIALIGHT con la mostra “CAM GIRLS MET LADIES”

A cura di Gaialight e Tiziana Faraoni

8 OTTOBRE - 23 OTTOBRE 2011

Inaugurazione Venerdi' 7 Ottobre 2011, ore 19.00

ISA – Istituto Superiore Antincendi – Via del Commercio 13 – Roma

Mostra visitabile dall' 8 al 23 Ottobre 2011 (dal Lunedi' al Sabato ore 16.00 - 19.30, Domenica
chiuso).

In occasione dell' edizione 2011 del Festival Fotografico Fotoleggendo, l' artista Italo -
Americana Gaialight (www.gaialight.com) presenta un nuovo progetto artistico, Cam Girls Met
Ladies, frutto della elaborazione di sintesi di due serie fotografiche (Cam Girls e Met Ladies)
realizzate a New York tra Febbraio e Maggio del 2011.

La mostra Cam Girls Met Ladies, concepita e studiata per Fotoleggendo 2011 come Installazione
Fotografica, mira a realizzare, come il titolo suggerisce, un incontro virtuale e cartaceo tra (Cam)
Girls e (Met) Ladies, le due serie fotografiche che Gaialight ha dedicato all' universo femminile,
alle sue molteplici sfaccettature e alla sua relazione con il mondo dell' Arte.

Le due serie costituiscono il risultato di "esplorazioni" fotografiche condotte nei primi mesi del
2011 su Internet e nelle Gallerie del Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York.

Cam Girls e' composta da fotografie di video performances in (diretta) streaming (Cam Girls e'
anche il primo capitolo della ancora inedita Screen Trilogy -Trilogia dello Schermo - composta
da Cam Girls, Video Games e Mass Surveillance, interamente realizzata nel 2011); Met Ladies e'
frutto di un lavoro artistico fotografico di "appropriazione" di dettagli e primi piani selezionati e
sezionati, di dipinti celebri appartenenti alla collezione permanente del Metropolitan Museum of
Art di New York.

Le sorprendenti affinità' e occulte sinergie tra questi due universi femminili così' diversi e
lontani nel tempo e nella storia, rappresentano anche ispirazione principale per la fusione -
incontro di queste due serie fotografiche nel titolo suggestivo e di sintesi, Cam Girls Met Ladies.

Testo critico a cura di Gavin Keeney.

Gaialight (www.gaialight.com) ha esposto in Europa, Sud America e Stati Uniti d’ America ed è tra gli artisti
delle nuove generazioni che rappresentano meglio la contaminazione dei linguaggi. Hanno scritto di lei le
principali testate della stampa qutidiana e periodica, italiana ed estera. E’ presente nell’opera in undici volumi
Arte Contemporanea, Electa Mondadori (volume 9 - Contaminazioni, capitolo Cinema). Dal 2007 vive in modo
permanente a New York. Nel 2010 (Febbraio e Marzo) e’ stata invitata dalla Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

(Bethany, Connecticut) come Artista in Residenza nell’ ambito del prestigioso programma di Residenze d’ Artista
della Fondazione. Nel Maggio 2011 partecipa al New York Photo Festival 2011 con Brooklyn Buzz, progetto
fotografico realizzato in collaborazione con Alessandro Cosmelli e presentato, per l’ occasione, nella sua versione
multimediale, al Dumbo Arts Center di Brooklyn, NY (Multimedia Show, a cura di Elisabeth Biondi ed Enrico
Bossan).

www.fotoleggendo.it

www.gaialight.com




WHEN CAM GIRLS MET LADIES

How photography comments on, distorts, or documents conditions in the world is part and parcel of its discursive
practice as an art. In this sense, the two photographic series by Gaialight, Cam Girls (2011) and Met Ladies (2011),
have, at first glance, nothing much in common. Yet, once the surface of the image is dealt with (and its suspected
narrative content demolished) the photographic image as a type of limit becomes in itself the actual subject of these
works. But image of what?

As limit, images are predictable insofar as they compress and, to a certain degree, shut down and silence the origin
of the image – its socio-economic origin or its reference to specific subjects or objects within the world. Franco
Moretti’s great insight into the novel as a means of providing an “exit” from what there is literally no exit from
– that is, the world at large – is also an extraordinary admission that the world is an immense construction of
interlocking visions (an internalizing artwork built atop a very real base or ground).

There are certain intellectual and ethical issues with Cam Girls, for example, that are unavoidable. The first order of
inquiry in the reception of theses images is their origin in the socio-economic conundrum that induced this digital
game of eroticized hide-and-seek between young women and online (presumable male) voyeurs. In the case of Met
Ladies the game is of another order and another time. The time of the museum is caught in this series as a strange
but very much alive art-historical time that suggests even the well-known critique of museums as mausolea is at
least half wrong (and, therefore, half true). Met Ladies is art-archaeological in this sense, but it is also playing
against the conventions of the museum and its preferred means of reception – the authorized linear narrative of
modern art history. In producing this synoptic, photographic survey of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and in selecting from within select canvases a “cut” or portion of that preferred means of reception, Gaialight has –
as with Cam Girls – indulged the artistic volition of imposing a limit and in doing so engaging an unlimited formal
force field within both art and photography (in Moretti’s sense a world-historical force field). This is the paradoxical
nature of art and its means of producing singular moments within a larger order that reduces and refines that order.
The “cut” is, therefore, analogous to a tailor taking a bolt of cloth and removing what is required to fashion a jacket
or coat. In this manner the “cut” performed in the echoing corridors of the Met extracts from singular historical
works of art what such works often repress through their own relationship to image as limit.

In the case of Cam Girls the Internet is an important aspect of the conditions supporting the images. Yet, in the
images, as limits imposed by photography, this origin is effectively neutralized or bracketed. Through the erasure
of the means supporting the activities portrayed a trace is retained of the innocence and light promiscuity behind the
questionable socio-economic phenomenon proper.

The most obvious perspective relative to the content provided by both Cam Girls and Met Ladies is the liberation
of a certain old-fashioned and out-moded term. The first sense or first temptation is to gender this term and offer it
as some sort of comment on the exploitation of women. But the larger and overriding term engaged by these works
is the ultimate term of endearment given to universal humankind (the nod toward Humanity proper), making these
images an act and survey of the state of that quaint and old-fashioned term.

In photography and painting it is axiomatic that the subject of the work often looks back at the observer, two
gazes meeting. Here, however, the gaze is tripled and its three forms only meet in a fourth subject, converging
on the universal subject of all Art, a somewhat forgotten subject that inhabits the internal force field of the
photograph. That forgotten subject is universal subjectivity itself, and a condition or state almost always translatable
to “conscience”.

Gavin Keeney

N.B.: As Chris Marker once said (in the film Le fond de l’air est rouge), “images sometimes tremble”. They do
so because they enfold as virtuous limit (as apparent singular thing) the very image of a fragile, imperiled, and
fluctuating universal subject.