Art & Exhibitions
At 33 Orchard, Mary Claire Ramirez Blends Opposites
THE DAILY PIC: The new-minted MFA makes photographs of clashing realities.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1344): I came across this intriguing photograph in a group show of MFA graduates from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, held at 33 Orchard gallery in New York. The image is by an artist named Mary Claire Ramirez, and twins a packing-Styrofoam frame and the falconer image that sits inside it. Beyond its collision of nature and industry, I’m not quite sure what the work is getting at – a puzzlement that I see as a virtue in the piece, not a vice. I do like the way the framed photo on the wall at 33 Orchard presents another photo that is framed elsewhere, otherwise – as though we’re being given a glimpse into some alternate reality where art obeys different rules.
Here’s what Ramirez says on her Web site: “I use materials and images that recall the interplay between class and classlessness, between culture and culturedness, I am linking up concepts of privilege, status, and superiority with socio-economic determinants of access and excess.”
Whereas I just want to know who that falconer is, and what the Styrofoam once protected.
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