Daniel Mirer / Artist Statements & Art Work Descriptions
In The Finest Tradition | Architor Space | Indifferent West
Title: In The Finest Tradition Daniel Mirer: In The Finest Tradition “In the Finest Tradition” displays my interest in ideas of gender and identity. Among my earliest memories are those of the socially ingrained concepts of identity and maleness. Coming from a male- dominated family, much of my framework of maleness and its manifested psychological constraints that defined how I should be, was for me an absurdity, a one-sided form of inclusiveness of the male construct. The men within the photographs are performers in an area of identity, a lifestyle. Many of my subjects do not fully embrace the persona of the uniform as masculinity, nor do they reject concepts of role-play. Instead, they step away from the trappings of male code and choose the parts of masculinity that they want to bring into the mainstream. The uniforms these subjects are wearing become extensions of their fulfilled imagination, creating a universe, which they occupy. The images are intended to be of male archetypes, exhibiting extremely masculine roles or career choices showing the pageantry of the uniform as an affirmation of identity. I photograph these individuals from a direct frontal point of view and within situations that embody possibilities of freedom of political commentary, from the imaginary into the familiar. I am fascinated by the gap between what we are, and what we think identity should be. Through the photographic medium, I collaborate with these individuals that have formed ideal masculine personas. Using this intimate process, I search for ways to awaken the irony of the male body and elicit the self through the construction of characters. |
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Title: Indifferent West Photographic Installation Project Dimensions: 20 x 20 in (50.8cm x 50.8cm) Color Photographs, Mounted and Framed Indifferent West is a photographic series that investigates the western American landscape and its touristic architectural sites. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier and the the center of American iconify. The images are of tourist sites, places that are familiar and cliche but that also cite that lack of a picturesque image of ideal landscape. The photographs represent an America western landscape from the point of view as a toursist. Traveling through place to place of this contemporary American west, sites representing cultural influences where the romantic constructions of land and people through its institutions the perpetuating a mythic West. The results are that the West has become a vast site of touristic ventures where elements of kitsch and consumption about space intersect with the comic. These models developed by private entertainment industries for tourism projecting the notion of an untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes raped in myth, attending to what is called the American West. The West had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage, were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious. The images show a recontextualize of the American west, indifferent to history establishing an American psyche; which has become into a self-referent notion of ambiguity. |