CLEAR BOUNDARIES: RANIA MATAR AND ARNE SVENSON: Online Exhibition - COVID 19

It seems as if life went on hold those past few weeks – for everyone.  I am always straddling my two cultures and identities, as a Lebanese/Palestinian and as an American.  It feels as if the news is always dividing us as “them v/s us”, and now here we are a “we”: all in this together, in the same boat, with life at a standstill and reduced to the confinement of home.  This virus is such an equalizer, making us all re-evaluate our shared humanity, our fragility, and our priorities.  

Isolation and confinement offered me the gift of time at home with my family, and in the studio with my work. I had almost forgotten how precious both are. With time and space to re-evaluate what matters, and with a need for human interaction, I reached out to a few friends and started visiting them – while keeping the physical distancing – and making their portraits through the window.  A new project about “connecting across barriers” emerged. From a few friends at first, the circle kept growing. It humbled me how many people were willing to be part of this, but also how important the human interaction we often took for granted, was – for both of us on either side of the window and of the camera.  Despite the fact that we only communicated across a physical barrier, we really and truly made a connection. The sense of being inside or outside was blurred. I am outside and looking in, but seeing the outside reflected onto the person in front of me.  Depending on where I stood, we could even overlap, connecting us on many levels, metaphorically and personally despite the physical barrier between us.

As the weeks went by and the “new normal” settled in, the portraits started transforming with the window almost acting like a stage and people on the inside becoming active participants in the photo session, bringing their ideas and their performances to the interaction we were creating.

This work is in progress.

ARNE SVENSON

 The Neighbors

In The Neighbors, I have turned outward from my usual studio based practice to study the daily activities of my downtown Manhattan neighbors, as seen through my windows into theirs. The grid structure of the windows frame the quotidian activities of the neighbors, forming images which are puzzling, endearing, theatrical and often seem to mimic art history, from Delacroix to Vermeer. The Neighbors is social documentation in a very rarefied environment. The large color prints have been cropped to various orientations and sizes to condense and focus the action.

Invisible

Whether they be manual laborers, immigrants, the disabled, the old – all have a palpable physicality, but manifest as unseen in the eyes of many beholders. My photographs of these subjects do not allow for identification or bring their countenance to the forefront; rather I am illustrating them as they are now, not as we hope they would be perceived. So I'll shoot through a window, a scrim, a curtain of smoke, alerting you to a presence but never revealing the person whom, without intervention, will always remain as pictured – invisible.