PHOTO:Surrogati-Un amore ideale
Dummies had undoubtedly a role in informing 15th Century artists’ study and portrayal of the human figure, while Leonardo da Vinci had a keen interest in automata and mechanical devices, which reached a peak of interest and intrigue among the most discerned minds of the 18th Century Enlightenment. However, it was only in the 20th Century that dummies and human surrogates became the focus of some artistic researches, serving as the ideal political medium to investigate human drives, social roles, gender identity, sexuality and power.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive
Comprising a selection of 42 photographic works by Jamie Diamond and Elena Dorfman, the exhibition “Surrogati. Un amore ideale” explores the notions of familiar, romantic and sexual love. Both artists focus on a specific and unconventional aspect of this universal theme: the emotional link between a man or a woman and a synthetic representation of a human. Jamie Diamond explores familial structures through the prism of memory. Her work lies at the intersection between fiction and representation, as she breaks all boundaries in what composes the family photograph. She collaborates with strangers, mimes, professional and untrained actors to replicate recognizable photographic genres through role play and staged events. Diamond forges artificial histories and relationships for the camera. By playing off these inherent fictions, she crafts a carefully fabricated personal myth, while challenging our perception as viewers. Ever deeper lies the disparity between image and reality. In her series “Forever Mothers” (2012-18) and “Nine Months of Reborning” (2014), Jamie Diamond protrayed the life of an outsider art making community called the Reborners, a group of self-taught female artists who hand-make, collect and interact with hyper-realistic dolls that fulfill a desire for motherhood. As stated by Diamond, “Working with the community allowed me to explore the grey area between reality and artifice where relationships are constructed with inanimate objects, between human and doll, artist and artwork, uncanny and real”. In her other exhibited project titled “I promise to be a good mother” (2007-12), Diamond played the role of a perfect mother, dressing up in her own mother’s clothes and interacting with Annabelle, a reborn doll. The project was inspired by and named after a diary she kept as a girl. Starting as a restaging of specific memories from her childhood in a variety of locations, the project evolved into an exploration of the complexity of social stereotypes and cultural conventions that surround and shape the relationship between mother and child and contribute to create its idealized or artistic representation. Since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988, Elena Dorfman has been specializing in documenting extreme circumstances and unusual subjects. In her series, “Still Lovers” (2001-04), she explores the relationship between hyper-realistic silicone sex dolls and their owners. In a recent interview, Elena Dorfman described the evolution of the series: “What began for me as a playful curiosity, how to photograph men having sex with 125 pounds of perfectly formed, synthetic female, rapidly turned into a serious exploration of the emotional ties that exist between men and women and their dolls. This exploration forced me to evaluate my own notions of love and what it means to value an object, a replacement human being, in effect, as real”. Both Diamond and Elena Dorfman partly abandon the mise en scene of the performance in favor of a more journalistic, almost documentary-like approach, that explores the relationship between humans and replicants.
Info: Curator: Melissa Harris, Fondazione Prada, Osservatorio, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan, Duration: 21/2-22/7/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-20:00, www.fondazioneprada.org
