Valerie Piraino: Photoplay

September 8 – October 13, 2013

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present Photoplay, new work by Valerie Piraino her first solo show in New York City. Photoplay has historical and formal connotations, referring to both a term for a screenplay and the experimentation with different approaches to photography. Piraino explores both meanings through photography, “drawn sculptures,” and a dramatic installation.

Piraino’s interests lie in converging different narrative methodologies and a whimsical approach to art making. Her installations and photographs tug on nostalgia as she investigates how domestic interiors influence and shape subjectivity. Creating works that mimic domestic spaces with a dated feel, Piraino looks to theater, literature, and cinema to make disorienting and haunting tableaux. Drawing from an archive of slides, these objects conjure the new and old. At once comforting and disorienting, Piraino’s eerie spaces act as a psychological backdrop where personal narratives and memories are continuously reinterpreted.

Her photographs also explore the malleable nature of memories, in a more literal manner. Scenes are projected onto fabric and photographed. The original image is distorted as it bends and moves with the folds of the fabric. As information hides behind the curved folds and distorts into a dark void, the projected image calls upon the nature of memory.

Photoplay takes theater and musicals as a point of departure and includes a photographic series, a slide installation and, what Piraino terms, “drawn sculptures.” These sculptures are a new body of work in which a burnishing method is used to make large photographic transfers onto drywall. The resulting images conflate photography, drawing, and sculpture by revealing the textured surface of the drywall, at once, referencing domestic spaces and theatrical design.