about
A duo show by Thy Tran and Regis Golay This show, which is the second part of the five-month focus on contemporary photography in 2017, features a video/photo collaboration between Regis Golay and Thy Trần. Australian-Vietnamese photographer Thy Tran focuses on people but rarely uses them as such. She refrains from presuming that placing a camera before a face will accurately and responsibly portray a model, friend, or oneself. Seldom do her subjects and observers regard one another. This absent gaze is made more evident by an interplay of revealed bodies and concealed identities. We are drawn to look but are unsure of what to look for. There are human figures but no stories, at least that we are made privy to. Swiss photography artist Regis Golay’s work both confronts and accepts a relationship between clients and photographers. Human bodies appear in a dispassionate and often subservient relation to the surrounding products: peering out, being consumed, or passively serving as framing devices. In his videos, objects are mobile or formidable, interacting with static or impotent bodies. The ability to instantly capture a subject, and the photograph’s tendency, more so than other art- works, to attach this representation to its entire referent, is deliberate and problematic. We don’t imagine ourselves as condensable into one image, yet we carry totemic images of others in our wallets or on our phones, standing in for and compromising the person’s whole. figures, forms, contraptions emphasizes this selective portrayal, extracting visual and narrative distortions from an apparently non-fictive medium. The show is under the patronage of the Consulate General of Switzerland in Ho Chi Minh City.
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