The photographs created by the collaborative team of artists Tarrah Krajnak and Wilka Roig investigate trends in the photographic representation of the female. Tarrah and Wilka place themselves in their own images as they perform and catalog representations of the female throughout decades and eras in photography, creating an archive of the trends, stereotypes, and classifications.
Their collaboration began in 2004 following response to simultaneous but separate critique of their individual work given by an influential NYC artist/critic/curator. During each of their studio visits Tarrah & Wilka each received the same response from the visiting critic who stated; As with most women who turn the camera on themselves, the work is overburdened with emotion. Upon discovering the similar response to their works, Tarrah and Wilka on a collaborative search for their place as artists and individuals within the art world and within photographic history.
Their upcoming exhibition at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, entitled Anthology of Trends will present three bodies of work which interpret three periods of the photographic representation of the female.
The ongoing series Anthology of Trends, Tarrah & Wilka’s first response to the afore mentioned studio visit and their first exploration in a larger project which is rooted in the language of the archive and the dialectic of performance; examines the contemporary images being produced by female artists which are being well-received throughout the art world today. Cataloging reoccurring trends as noted by such varying states of undress, emotional frailty, isolation, and indirect visual references to sexual desire and experience, they mimic the dominant themes and gestures in the works of their contemporaries. Tarrah & Wilka’s use of the diptych format in which both photographers appear before and work behind the camera, prevents their work from simply mirroring their subject matter. In bringing forth redundancy, they invite us the viewer to experience a double-take and thus question the motifs and representations being brought forth in contemporary art.
Emerging in the Victorian era, female hysteria was a once common medical diagnosis. The symptoms included faintness, nervousness, insomnia, irritability, or a loss of appetite for food or sex. No longer recognized by modern medicine, the historical diagnosis of hysteria was seen as a catch all for a number of afflictions, many of which resulted from cultural perception of the female wife as non-sexual and pious. Tarrah and Wilka’s photographs from their series Hysteria Collection toy with depictions of this historical hysterical female. Juxtaposed with representations of a contemporary “hysterical” female, the artists question Western culture’s current versions of a “hysterical” female, such as the female artist who is “overburdened with emotion”.
The photographs from Tarrah and Wilka’s Light and Form series which was produced while the artists were in residence at CPW in 2008, references the nude photography popularized by the camera clubs and magazines of the 1950s. Their cliché poses of the “goddess” woman, poised with curved hip, are always gently clutching a wall or standing in an awkward yet sultry balance. These soft-focus and heavily touched up photographs presented the female as an object, subject to the (typically male) viewer’s gaze. Tarrah and Wilka have retained these elements of the “camera club” look but arrest our gaze by wearing white leotards to focus attention on the formation of the pose instead of their nude bodies.
Throughout the exhibition Anthology of Trends, Tarrah & Wilka humorously toy with prevalent conceptions of the representation of women while, at the same time, their photographs create a stirring catalog which, through performative redundancy, highlights and examines western culture’s generalized visions of women by both sexes. They also reflexively challenge themselves as minority / collaborative / women artists – continuously questioning what implications, boundaries, and possibilities these identities impose on their work.
Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru. Adopted by Czech-American parents, she grew up in Ohio. In 2004, Tarrah received an MFA in Photography from the University of Notre Dame, and she is now based in Winooski, Vermont, where she teaches Photography in the Art Department at the University of Vermont, Burlington. Wilka Roig was born and raised in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. She moved to Ithaca, New York in 1995 and received her MFA in Photography from Cornell University in 2005. Wilka still lives in Ithaca, where she teaches Photography in the Department of Art at Cornell University.
Collaboratively, they have exhibited nationally at such venues as The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; San Fransisco Camerawork; the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; and at the galleries at Johnson State College in VT, the University of Toledo in OH, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK. In 2008, they were recipients of artists grants from the Vermont Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Cornell Council for the Arts. Tarrah and Wilka were artists-in residence at CPW in 2008. For more information please visit www.tarrahwilka.org.
On Thursday, April 23, 2009, Tarrah & Wilika will be performing at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “Analog Catalog”. The performance begins at 7pm and is free and open to the public. For more information visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum
Anthology of Trends will be on view in CPW’s Kodak gallery from April 11 through May 24, 2009.
The opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 11th from 5-7pm with an artist talk by Tarrah & Wilka at 6pm.
