The University Art Gallery presents “Laurel Nakadate: Strangers and Relations,” an exhibition of large-scale color portrait photographs drawn from Nakadate’s Star Portraits and Relations series.
Records of first-time encounters taken at night in isolated locations, lit by moonlight and a single handheld flashlight, these photographs construct fragile, intimate relationships between artist, subject and viewer. The show opens Saturday, Jan. 18, and runs through April 6. Nakadate will talk about her work near the end of the show, on April 4.
In the summer of 2011, Laurel Nakadate began to photograph strangers for the Star Portraits series, inviting friends of friends, Facebook “friends,” and curious members of the online community to meet her at night in remote corners of the United States and Europe. During the same time period, Nakadate also undertook DNA and genealogical research, discovering genetic ties to the descendants of slaves and pilgrims, the McCoy clan, and the early Protestant feminist Anne Hutchinson, among others. She contacted distant relatives on DNA websites, and arranged to meet them, also at night, in order to make their portraits for Relations. Her subjects, whether distant relatives or Internet contacts, appeared for their portraits without prior instructions and chose their own clothing. The results are photographic performances that record the instant that the artist and her subjects see each other for the first time, capturing the connection of strangers. This connection has been an important part of Nakadate’s work since her earliest video pieces, in which she recorded herself dancing or singing with strangers met through chance encounters. In the photographs of “Strangers and Relations,” Nakadate does not appear in front of the camera herself, except in the DNA that she shares with her diverse subjects.
“In my early videos, I physically appeared in the work. In these new portraits, I am allowing my body, my DNA, to navigate my direction; where I will travel and whom I will meet,” she said. These strangers, who are also distant cousins, share bits of DNA with me—in some ways, these images become modern-day self-portraits. I see these strangers, who are also relatives, as little glimmers of the ancestors who connected us hundreds of years ago.
Nakadate was born in Austin, Texas, in 1975 and was raised in Ames, Iowa. From 1999 to 2001, while completing her MFA in photography at Yale University, she began to create provocative works in video, photography, performance and film that challenge conventional perceptions of power, seduction, tenderness and trust. Nakadate’s early relationship to the fixed single viewpoint of the camera (as both artist and subject), her insistence on simple production values, and her upending of public and private ritualistic behaviors, anticipated the amateur video aesthetic of YouTube diaries and Internet blogs. A major monograph, “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears,” featuring a year-long photographic “performance,” in which the artist forced herself to cry each day during the year 2010, was recently published by Hatje Cantz and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, including a critically acclaimed ten-year survey, “Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely” at MoMA PS 1 in 2011. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and other distinguished institutions. The artist has also received widespread acclaim for two feature-length films, “Stay the Same Never Change,” which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and “The Wolf Knife” (2010), which was nominated for Gotham and Independent Spirit Awards and was the featured work in the Believer Magazine’s 2012 annual film issue.
Sewanee’s University Art Gallery is located on Georgia Avenue. The gallery is free, accessible, and open to the public. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays and 12–4 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays. For more information call 598-1223 or go to <www.sewanee.edu/gallery>.
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