relationship status:, 2019
Relationship status: is a series from Aiala Hernando and Addie Wagenknecht using self portraiture as a means of translating/exploring the private as public female experience. The artists use site specific real floral arrangements, alongside contemporary artifacts within the artists’ lived experiences; the personal objects strewn across the works serve both as a portrait of the modern women but also of the artists themselves: healing crystals, prescriptions, diet potions, pregnancy test and other alchemy. The works represent the fantasy of the internet, where images are curated and perfected in order to convey the ideal versions of ourselves- at first you see the living flowers, then you see the old takeout containers, elixirs, beauty tools and finally the artists themselves.
I know that I’m a handful baby, 2019, Giclée Print, Edition of 30, 90x60cm
Site specific work placed in the fogged over sky of London. The focal point is the flowers, more so than in other images, the warmth comes from the peonies, not windows. Under eye concealer, caffeine pills, stale coffee, contactless credit cards, the leftover nail polish from last night's rave form the composition of metropolitan living, of exhaustion and having it all as a balance in always moving. The artists appear only as an artifact of a night out, a photobooth at the bar suggest long hours away from their flat.
I want all of you all the strings attached, 2019, Giclée Print, Edition of 30, 90x60cm
A site specific work drawing the current flower trends of New York City, with items sourced from Aiala, Addie and friends based in New York- including prescriptions for sleeping pills, anxiety medications, starbucks skinny lattes, dunkin donuts, a half eaten snickers from the bodega at 3am, the artist’s US passport. The artist’s iPhone with the broken screen from dropping it while on her bike, the stack of books that acts as the bedside table. The artists’ legs appear in the mirror, as if to suggest their presence while without revealing their identity playing with the notion of universal femininity and private rituals of space.
I know I tend to make it about me, 2019, Giclée Print, Edition of 30, 90x60cm
The golden evening light of Paris. The viewer sees the artists’ thighs, legs, hands but not the entire body to create a feeling of longing within the work- to see what is concealed, to understand who is attached. This form of active looking implicates the viewer into the process and highlights further into the series, the role of desire as a productive force. The relationship of their bodies is mediated by the mirror, the careful framing and layering of used cigarettes, a wine glass along with the artist’s Chanel lipstick left as the only remaining artifact of the evening, overused candles and stale baguettes.
I don't do relationships all I do is threesomes, 2019, Giclée Print, Edition of 30, 90x60cm
A site specific work drawing items from LA: leftover delivery food, a half used tube of glossier balm dot com, Moon Juice (Beauty dust), crystals for attracting love and clarity, a low calorie smoothie (gluten free and organic), used condom and gum wrappers, pregnancy test (negative), palo santo and a half used bottle of hair, skin, nails. A selfie being edited on facetune is visible on the phone. The work is intentionally bright- using the intensity of the sun to illuminate the flowers, and hint at self-adsorption as the ultimate luxury good.
Artist Statement:
What are the conditions for making a portrait?
In 2019, if you have a phone and a face, you’re a photographer. Historically however, portraits meant a studio, controlled lights, intention. For much of the previous century, the exposure of a photographic film meant holding a pose for long periods of time, if you moved, it output as a blur. The earliest known portrait (or you could argue, the selfie itself) was taken in 1840 from Parisian photographer Hippolyte Bayard. Bayard posed as a corpse because the process of taking the images involved staying still for twelve minutes, but in the mid-twentieth century, a portrait could be shot instantly anywhere. Even so, the private realm of the artist space remained a sort of alchemy and safe space.
The intimacies of the portrait, home and the agency of a woman behind a camera is part of an exploration in their new series Relationship Status: that Aiala, based in Amsterdam, and Addie, based in Austria are exploring. Their subject is a sort of puzzle like composition, littered with a shrine of personal items- their passports, broken phones, old delivery food, discarded pregnancy test, prescription medicines, bras and other private commonplace items. The mirrors and sliced fragments of backdrops- the bedside tables and stacks of their coffee table books are incorporated into the images, heightening their visual textures while recalling works like Tracey Emin My Bed and the sacred space of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Hidden within portions of the work is always Hernando and Wagenknecht’s semi- nude figures, other times they serve as just an artifact within the image itself- showing up in a message on the phone, or as a strip of black and white images strewn on the desk. Unlike many of their peers contemporary portraiture works, Hernando and Wagenknecht’s resulting photographic works can appear so surreal, they are often mistaken for paintings.
All of the fragmentation and objects serve a conceptual purpose as well as a compositional one, underscoring the position that women have occupied for most of art history. The artists’ private site specific objects unlock a sort of whisper network like history of the female bedroom as a safe space for expression and self. In an interview last year, Wagenknecht spoke of her interest in "femme modernism" and said that she hoped that the work would lead viewers 'to think about the structures of portraiture and of the way we see visibility, and who has the right to it (as much as invisibility) and the generic sense of placelessness in new ways."
As the title suggest, the work is built on the notion of unmasking the artifice of traditional studio portrait photography, and to make visible the complex power dynamic between the image and the photographed- a dynamic similar to a romantic relationship (as many of the titles within the series delude to precisely that). Hernando and Wagenknecht’s images reveal a number of parameters for how our relationships are negotiated between ourselves and the subjects, and between us and the image.