"There are some instances in the work when I look at an image and see my mother. There are others where it looks as if my mother is wearing a mask of herself. I cannot help but see myself in all the roles and gestures that I perform in these images. The photographs are only truths insofar as truths are unrepresentable."
Artist: Alana Perino
Project: In a Condition of No Light
"My mother lives in a dark apartment with beautiful things that are easily broken. I lived in this apartment with my mother, my grandmother before her passing, and eventually my stepfather as well. I was a child then. Lately, I find myself in my attachments to objects, corners of rooms, and the ways my body arranges itself comfortably or uncomfortably while visiting - and I make photographs. Sometimes I ask my mother and stepfather to be in the photographs. Sometimes we dress for our parts. Sometimes we make up stories about why. Sometimes only the apartment appears, the apartment and its objects. Sometimes traces of our Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors appear, either in our bodies or otherwise."
"I often wonder if this work is autobiographical. My instinct is to say that it is not because I don’t want it to be. I have become a very private person and the moments depicted here are all very private in nature. But I also know that when I look at the pictures, the facticity of my mother’s face reminds me that regardless of how many people we may pretend to be, we simply cannot help but be ourselves. There are some instances in the work when I look at an image and see my mother. There are others where it looks as if my mother is wearing a mask of herself. I cannot help but see myself in all the roles and gestures that I perform in these images. The photographs are only truths insofar as truths are unrepresentable.
I create fictions rooted in autobiography. These fictions are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, theater, and canon; as well as through the untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. This investigation into lineages of familial domesticity questions how a home generates, spatializes, and entombs the conditions of whiteness, wealth, and gender. The home in question being our home, the neurosis of diaspora and assimilation flicker as the steady undercurrent on this private stage. Because the work is about the plastic truths of the apartment, it is also about the things in the apartment, and the people who occupy the apartment – all of which respond in strange and careful ways as we circumnavigate each other in the play of our given domestic roles. At stake is the potential to fracture calcified molds, reenvision archetypes of enmeshment, and develop rituals of empathy across time, selves, and generations through the impossible practice of healing."
© Alana Perino
Editor : Ecaterina Rusu