David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing

For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s  hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual  counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.

Aaron; 2015; Photographic prints on archival translucent vellum, physically cut and woven together; 40 x 31 x ¼ in, 101.5 x 78.75 x 1.25 cm; Courtesy David Samuel Stern

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Internalized Borders at John Jay

Francisco Donoso, Between Passages, installation, 2018 image, photo courtesy of the artist
Francisco Donoso, Between Passages, installation, 2018, photo courtesy of the artist

Curated by Maria de Los Angeles and Susan Noyes Platt, the group show “Internalized Borders” at John Jay  College of Criminal Justice examines the various ways in which language and legal systems create internal and external borders. It addresses urgent issues of  immigration, detention, and deportation; especially focusing on how these issues are related to fear, criminalization of identity, economics of migration, and  perception of otherness. Continue reading “Internalized Borders at John Jay”