Kerry
Skarbakka & Marla Rutherford:
Re-Presenting
the Portrait
Two Concurrent Solo Exhibitions
June 30 -August 4
Opening Reception: Saturday June 30, 6-8 PM
Irvine
Contemporary is pleased to announce an
exhibition of new and recent photographs by internationally
acclaimed artists Kerry Skarbakka and Marla Rutherford. Both
artists are working at a vitally significant intersection
of approaches to the photographic image today: performative
photography, staged and provocative hyperreal fictions, and
new approaches the to photographic portrait.
The exhibition will run from June 30
through August 4. Opening reception, Saturday
June 30, 6-8 PM. An essay by photography collector Henry Thaggert
will accompany the exhibition.
Kerry Skarbakka
In the series The Struggle to Right Oneself, Kerry Skarbakka
stages himself in scenes of losing balance and control. His arresting
photographs appear at the intersection of performance and artist's
portraits, and each composition dramatizes one of the deepest
themes of our moment--the sense losing balance and control both
personally and socially. The photographs are actual shots
of the artist in the scene with only the minimal rigging and
wires used for the shot removed from the final print. The photographs
also record a deep sense of risk-taking and often physical danger
for the artist, who has taken falls and created physically demanding
sets in the search of the right arresting image. Skarbakka extended
this theme further in the performances commissioned by the Museum
of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2005, Life
Goes On.
Artist’s Statement for The Struggle to Right Oneself
Heidegger described human existence as a process of perpetual
falling, and it is the responsibility of each individual to "catch
ourselves" from our own uncertainty. My work is in response
to this delicate state. It questions what it means to resist
the struggle, to simply let go, and the consequences of holding
on. The images stand as reminders that we are all vulnerable
to losing our footing and grasp, symbolizing the precarious
balancing act between the struggle against our desire to survive
and our fantasy to transcend our humanness.
About the Artist
Kerry Skarbakka has an MFA in
Photography from Columbia College, Chicago, IL. His work been
been exhibited internationally, including gallery exhibitions
in Chicago, Seattle, Antwerp, Belgium, New York, and Los Angeles,
and in major art fairs (Photo London, Paris Photo, Miami Photo,
and The Armory Show). Kerry Skarbakka lives and works in Brooklyn,
NY.
Marla Rutherford
Marla Rutherford’s work references
many genres of photography—the staged portrait, fashion and glamour,
advertising, fetish, film stills, Pirelli Calendars—to
present highly original fictional and performative portraits that play
off incongruous worlds, often interrupting a domestic scene with a fantasy
image or placing a seductive fetish portrait in a commonplace, everyday
scene. Marla Rutherford’s arresting images merge several approaches
in photography—the studio and staged portrait, the photographic
image as performance, and photography’s associations with fashion,
advertising, and fetish. Her seductive and flawless C-prints from medium
format negatives enter an art scene that has already assimilated Gregory
Crewdson’s cinematic staging, the domestic portraits of Tina Barney,
Larry Sultan, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and the pop-porn, glam, and
advertising style of David LaChapelle. Rutherford also reaches back to
Helmut Newton and forward to recent futuristic cyberfetish images. She
stages her models in incongruous domestic and banal settings and achieves
the effect of simultaneously disrupting the everyday with heightened
erotic drama and domesticating the otherworld of fetish.
Marla Rutherford’s work is now in the
traveling museum exhibition, reGeneration:
50 Photographers of Tomorrow, which was organized by the curators
at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The exhibition was launched in the US at the Aperture gallery in New
York, and Aperture Press has published the exhibition catalogue, reGeneration:
50 Photographers of Tomorrow.
About the Artist Marla
Rutherford has her BFA in Photography from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2005). Her work has been exhibited
in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, and she has published
photographs in The Village Voice, TIME, The
New Yorker, and PHOTO Magazine
(France), among many others. Marla Rutherford lives and works in
Los Angeles, CA.
Artist's
Resume (pdf)
Exhibition
Press Release in pdf
