ALMANAQUE fotográfica and The Empty Circle are pleased to present Object to be Desired, a duo exhibition of artists Claudia Doring Baez and Stuart Sandford. Through a new series of paintings by Doring Baez and an ongoing series of polaroid collages by Sandford, Object to be Desired, named after Man Ray’s readymade piece, Object to be Destroyed, explores the act of art making as a way to capture, explore and reassemble the artist’s object of desire. Although working in different mediums with classical nude forms, both artists reconstruct their subjects through the filter of their own evolving biography. This process imbues their art with a visceral intimacy only exceeded by possessing the object itself. Object to be Desired will be on view at ALMANAQUE fotográfica in Mexico City from May 15th to June 4th, 2021.
In a new series of expressive oil paintings, Claudia Doring Baez adorns bold color onto the black and white muses of Dada and Surrealist pioneer, Man Ray. Meticulously posed and oftentimes restrained, the women Man Ray photographed were transformed into decaying classical sculptures, such as the Venus De Milo, or the barren landscape of an early Surrealist painting. Doring Baez deconstructs these iconic images with the intent to understand the male need to objectify and subjugate women in art. The results are rich paintings of once passive subjects, now transformed into vibrant, active participants. Doring Baez steps into Man Ray’s shoes not only to assert her female perspective of the power dynamic, but also to imagine an alternate past.
“My body is a 60-year-old body. My Lee [Miller] and Meret [Oppenheimer] moment has passed, but I had it. I could’ve exposed myself that very same way, but I chose not to - I wasn’t going to be anyone’s object. Still the mystery of what it means to be a woman lingers. The objectifying of a woman’s body as I have done in these paintings is a search for who I was, what I was, what I will no longer be.”
Stuart Sandford’s Polaroid Collages are one step less removed from this same exploration of self. The source material is his own, but the time past has allowed Sandford to contextualize his experiences and reimagine them within the greater narrative of his artistic journey. Using polaroids of his dionysian friends and lovers, Sandford often assembles them together with images of the surrounding flora where these intimate, often erotic moments occured. The results of his craft are the delicate and beautiful objects you might find in a treasured journal or hidden under a bedroom floorboard. We return to these little sculptural gems over and over to soothe our longing for who we were, remembered through our past travels and relationships. Or perhaps, when Sandford marries two of his lovers together, it is a reimagining of who we were, what we wished to be and what we dreamed our lovers would be for us.
“The works exhibited bring together the two main facets of my practice, the photographic and the sculptural. The 35mm works on display, examples of my most recent 35mm work, are sensual, desirous of the forms captured within, be that of a beautiful young man on my bed or a beautiful statue of a young man (that of Antinous) in the Vatican in Rome. The Polaroid Collages are instant sculptures, reformed physical objects of desire/ connection, taking inspiration from both classical and contemporary art history and, in a world of ephemeral images scrolling across our (phone)screens, both series exist as beautiful, tangible, and delicate real world objects.”
About The Artists
Born in Mexico City and based in New York, Claudia Doring Baez’s paintings are animated by a reverence for art history and literature — she selects, re-creates, and adopts details from images to create a contemporary, expressionistic vocabulary. Solo Exhibitions and Fairs include: Denise Bibro Fine Art, Aqua Miami, Zona Maco, Scope Basel. Group Exhibitions at Zurcher Gallery, Lehman College, La MaMa Galleria, Ethan Cohen Gallery, and publications such as Art News Magazine. Doring Baez is represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art in NYC and Galeria Emma Molina in Mexico. Her work is in the DeWoody and Ringier collections.
Stuart Sandford was born in Sheffield, England but has lived and worked in the USA for the last 10 years, 5 of those in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Centre de la Photographie, Genève. His work has been featured in numerous publications and it appears in many private collections around the world including the Sir Elton John Photography Collection. In November 2020, during the few weeks of the reopening after the historic lockdown, ALMANAQUE presented his first show in México: Lush.
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