Charlotte Jansen Presents: Portrait, Self, Other
A discussion between five artists JK Lavin (Alta Vista Arts) Tonje Birkeland and Maria Pasenau (Glydenpris Kunsthall), Kennedi Carter (Cierra Britton Gallery) and Nancy Floyd, moderated by curator Fiona Rogers (V&A).
Why do we keep turning the camera on ourselves? What do self-portraits reveal about the self? What do self-portraits reflect about the wider world we live in? Are all portraits, as the old adage goes, self-portraits? Portraiture remains a timeless and highly charged genre in art and photography. Women artists working in photography have pushed the art form in exciting, original and engaging new directions in the last century.
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Speakers
JK Lavin
J.K. Lavin is a visual artist based in Venice, California. Lavin’s photographic practice considers memory, self-portraiture and the measurement of time. Duration, as well as experimentation with randomness and chance are important dimensions of her work. She received a MA degree in Photography from California State University following studies at The Visual Studies Workshop and The Center of the Eye.
Lavin’s work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including Photo London, the Museo De La Naturaleza De Cantabria; Milan Photo Fair; Fotofever and The Griffin Museum of Photography. Lavin was selected as Critical Mass 2020 Finalist and Klompching Gallery Fresh 2019 Finalist.
Tonje Bøe Birkeland
Tonje Bøe Birkeland (b. 1985 in Bergen, Norway) has an MFA from Bergen Academy of Art & Design. Birkeland started working on the project The Characters in 2008, with an aim to encapsulate an entire artistic practice. Birkeland’s project THE CHARACTERS, submerges the viewer in her universe through large-scale photographs and carefully selected objects and texts. On Birkeland’s expedition, female explorers are staged in “Unknown Territory”. Each of The Characters shapes a meta-journey: that of the artist. The imagined female heroines have taken Tonje to the East Coast of Greenland, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and through the Inner Himalayas of Bhutan. Recent shows include: The Matrix of Power, Nitja, Lillestrøm (2024), “The Voyage Out”, Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Bergen (2023), “The Characters”, Character # V, Fotografihuset, Oslo (2022), Over the Rainbow, Preus Museum, Horten (2022), “The Characters”, Sølvberget galleri, Stavanger (2021) and “The Characters”, Nuuk Art Museum, Nuuk (2021).
Kennedi Carter
Kennedi Carter (b. 1998), is a digital media based artist, born in Charlottesville, Virginia and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Through archiving & photography, she aims to highlight the aesthetics & sociopolitical aspects of Black life as well as the overlooked beauties of the Black experience: skin, texture, trauma, pleasure, love and community. Her work aims to reinvent notions of creativity and confidence in the realm of Blackness. Her work has been featured in the RISD Museum (2022), the Nasher Museum of art at Duke (2022), Saatchi Gallery (2021 & 2022), the Harwood Museum of Art (2022), The Harvey B. Gantt Center (2023), Rose Gallery 2023
Nancy Floyd
Nancy Floyd uses photography, video, and mixed-media to address the ways in which lens-based media can connect deeply with experience and memory. Much of her work addresses the passage of time, representations of women, and the aging female body. More recently she’s begun a wide-ranging exploration of trees and the people who care for and study them. Floyd has received many notable awards including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including The High Museum of Art (Atlanta) and The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). Raised in League City, Texas, she now lives in Bend, Oregon.
Maria Pasenau
Maria Pasenau (b.1994) works with photography, installation, performance, and sculpture. Pasenau creates boundary-breaking exhibitions that thematize taboo topics such as gender, body, and sexuality, where she directs a reflective and ironic point at contemporary self-staged media culture. The expression is direct, self-disclosing and apparently unpolished and uncensored. Through her artistic practice, Pasenau brings forth multi-voiced expressions of what it means to be a woman today, where sexuality is closely linked with vulnerability. For Gyldenpris Kunsthall / Photo London, Maria Pasenau will exhibit a recent series of self-portraits, shot in Hardanger and Bergen: Inspired by popular culture and witchcraft protagonists, and with one dada superhuman as starting point.