Persona
October 2-30, 2015
Trois Gallery, SCAD-Atlanta
Celebrating a new shared direction in the recent practices of SCAD-Atlanta photography students, Persona showcases more than fifty artworks that turn away from the trappings of the outside world and consider, instead, inward, personal reflection as their focus. Adapting the centuries-old genre of portraiture to contemporary issues of identity, undergraduate and graduate students have represented their own likenesses and those of family members, friends and strangers from all over the world in the process of self-discovery and as a means to establish their own points of view.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines persona as “the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others.”[1] This description indicates a meeting point between the self and the other and a distinction among who a person is, what that person presents to the world and how that information is interpreted. The collection of works on view in Persona probes this intersection. The images convey the artists’ individual growing pains, journeys toward self-discovery, genealogical investigations and struggles with perception, all the while proclaiming pride, truth and acceptance. Confronting viewers’ preconceptions, each photograph becomes a voice amplified, a transformation, a personal presence of the subject and the artist.
The represented artists challenge the genre of portraiture not only in content but also in practice. Portraiture is reinvented using the oldest techniques, like the pinhole camera, the most current methods and everything in-between. The works on view include cyanotypes, mixed media photographic collage, multiple exposure, artist’s books, digital color photography, black and white prints and video. Images range from formal portraits to blurred abstractions.
Andrew Lyman
In his changing installation, Diary, Andrew Lyman explores the intersections of disjointed moments and narrative, of precious and throwaway, of self and other. Loosely organized 4- by 6-inch snapshots – taken with a 35 millimeter camera initially belonging to his father and documenting his own childhood, scanned, retouched, and printed – record the lives of his family and friends over the past several years. The viewer draws her own conclusions, linking images by proximity, formal relationship, or “character.” The visual poem transforms as a new layer of images is superimposed each week.
