Posted on
2018-06-18
Mistaken Identities: Images of Gender and Transformation considers how photographic representations reinforce or subvert prevailing roles of gender and sexuality. In particular, the exhibition looks at instances where social roles may be deliberately exaggerated or transgressed, including photographs that involve cross-dressing, nudity, mimicry, and other acts of queering social norms. Featured photographers and their subjects manipulate the conventions of photographic portraiture to explore changing notions of gender and sexuality, including Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ) identities.
The images in Mistaken Identities play with the discrepancies between public and private performance of identity. Staging the performance for the camera, they pose overt and often personal challenges to public standards of “appropriate” behavior. Depending on the social context, the subjects’ role-playing may be intimate or extravagant, endearing or shocking. Considering the social signifiers of the body or the role of fashion in image making, the works in Mistaken Identities deploy portraiture to destabilize visual expectations and invert markers of identification, thereby questioning the notion of a stable, authentic self.
Opposite – Adolfo Patiño, 1979
Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2018
The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street
New York
10001 NY
www.walthercollection.com
