Labyrinths

Candid photography portraits of individuals walking across the great hall of Grand Central Station in New York City over a two-week period in 2019.

As a Latin-American living and working in New York since my early teens, my personal histories have been and continue to be wrought by access, and how access is denied or given to locations, to power, to social agency, to identity, to knowledge, to economic class, and even to North-American culture. By documenting individuals passing through Grand Central Station, I am creating a site-specific visual ethnography with which I seek to evaluate agency along with the aforementioned terms for this specific location.

The series was inspired by the Kore and Kouros, the free-standing archaic Greek sculpture of female and male figures. As I began to photograph the series, the sculptures kept flashing in my memory, and particularly, the idea that an artist 2500 years ago was transposing a representation of the female and male body onto the stone, and here I was thinking that 2500 years later my photographs were documenting a real woman and a real man with individual names and personal histories. If you suspend belief for a moment, set aside the time in between, and let the Kore and Kourus stand side by side with these portraits, this is what a human being looks like 2500 years later.    

Each work in this series is a photograph that has been aleatorily disassembled, re-layered with selections from the same image, and re-colored in post-production. Both camera and lens were calibrated to invoke [art] painting mechanical processes. These efforts were unconscious at first and it dawned on me that I was borrowing visual language from the art [painting] canon. However, the deconstruction and fragmentation of each image are meant to be obvious so as to involve the lay viewer in the conceit that these are constructions despite the photography portraits.

Labyrinths is also guided by metaphysical elements extrapolated from Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction and by a personal interpretation of a motif found in the [gold-based] anthrozoomorphic ritual-art of The Muisca, a pre-Columbian, South-American culture. What I believe Borges' fiction proposes is that human knowledge has a misplaced sense of certainty that makes it paper-thin, thus I consciously sought to render these works with very little depth-of-field structured along a minimalist aesthetic preoccupied with projecting a visually-tactile bi-dimensional space.

 
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Email: marco@ma9.co
Tel: 347.772.9370 in New York City