On their face, photography and language don’t have much in common. But Claire A. Warden’s work draws the line between them.
Warden is an artist who co-curated an exhibition now showing at the Scottsdale Civic Center called “Photography in Translation.” In it, four artists use sometimes abstract forms of photography to explore what language in translation means to them.
The Show spoke with Warden more about it, beginning with her own work … which *is photography, but certainly doesn’t look like any photograph you’ve seen before.
“So I do a unique cameraless photographic process,” Warden explained. “I work with light sensitive material. I work with black and white negatives, and I am using a process that breaks down the emulsion of the film, the black and white film, and what’s left over from that process is biologic matter and metallic silver.
“And so I was interested in this idea of a photograph that was of me, of my body, but not representing my likeness and making a situation for people to question what they’re looking at,” she said.
It comes out of her own experience. She was born in Montreal, Canada, where she was raised French-speaking and went to an all-French-speaking school. But when her family moved to Arizona, she found herself faced with a question that stopped her in her tracks: “What are you?”
Full conversation
CLAIRE A. WARDEN: That kind of shock of like hearing that question? I remember that distinctly. I remember thinking, I must be translating this question incorrectly, because “what” is reserved for objects, no? Not people. Who am I? How am I? But “what”? I just did not know how to approach an answer to that.
And as somebody who is multi ethno-cultural, once I realized that that question is asking me, why do I look the way I do? I really struggled with finding an answer that I felt was complete, was true to myself and that wouldn’t warrant follow up comments like, “Oh, you don’t look Canadian.”
So with this process, I got really excited by the idea of making an abstracted portrait of me, of my body, but does not reveal what I look like. It’s not just showing people my likeness. So making work that becomes illegible.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So let me ask you about this new exhibition. You were co-curator. You helped choose the artists. You looked at the theme, and it’s titled “Photography in Translation,” which makes sense with what you just described as the work that you do.
Tell us about the artists that are coming together here and how each of you sort of approach this idea of translation differently.
WARDEN: Absolutely. So photography has a history of representation and identification of people. This has roots that go further back into colonialism. And so I’m thinking about what does it mean today for artists of color to be using this medium to talk about identity, to talk about lived experience and to use this medium, this visual language, maybe also to translate something that is hard to say, hard to speak?
So in the exhibition, you will see Elizabeth Pineda’s cyanotypes made on corn husks Anh-Thuy Nguyen’s black and white silver gelatin prints with a video component. Annie Lopez’s cyanotypes on tamale wrapper papers which are sewn together with thread and my black and white cameraless photographs.
GILGER: So you’ve got four of you different artists, different backgrounds, different ideas, but the same meditation, right? I wonder, what did you learn as you watched this work come in as you worked with these other artists to create something that was cohesive? I mean, it must have revealed something to you about your own work and about what it means to others.
WARDEN: It was a really exciting process to be able to bring these three other artists into this exhibition in dialogue with each other, in dialogue with my work. When I was asked to, co-curate this exhibition, some people came immediately to mind that I wanted to dialogue with.
For example, Anh-Thuy’s work, the series is called “A is for Alphabet,” and in this series, these are fairly close black and white photographs of Anh-Thuy and a native English speaker that she collaborated with for this photographic series. And these are photographs of her as the English learner and the native English speaker speaking English in front of the camera. And this idea of language starting to become abstract.
So even though the photographs may look fairly clear, there is this layer of language as an abstraction, especially as someone learning a language and learning the way that a mouth moves to speak that language.
There is this sense of abstraction that happens in that work, where then I also think about Elizabeth Pineda’s work, where this work is considering home. It’s considering where is home and who decides? It’s considering bureaucratic process. In the series, there are corn husks that have her birth certificate printed on it and her marriage license. And the way that the kind of waves and ripples of the corn husk distort and make these documents illegible.
Part of the inspiration for that work was when Elizabeth was applying for a passport and some of her documents were deemed ineligible because her last name, or her married name was different. And so who decides what is an eligible document? Who decides where your home is? And I think this work really emphasizes this illegibility, this idea of representation, this idea of words and language.
But also there’s something a little futile in the bureaucratic process of describing oneself in language that really comes to the forefront about that work for me. And then I think also about Annie Lopez’s work, one piece in particular in the exhibition that says, “I look Mexican.”
And that brings me back to this idea of how does one look a certain way? How does one look Mexican or not Mexican? Or how does one look Canadian or not Canadian?
GILGER: Right. That same question you were asked as a kid.
WARDEN: Exactly. So, I think there’s this really lovely connective tissue through the exhibition, even though everybody is approaching these topics of representation, identity, language, written language and verbal language in vastly different approaches.
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