Philadelphia, PA – March 15, 2010: Dalet Gallery is pleased to present “Fabricating Truths, Shaping Stories,” an exhibition of recent works of photographer Ricardo Barros and mixed media artist Martha Posner. 

April 30- June 6, 2010               

Fabricating Truths, Shaping Stories

Stories take many forms, including stories told through the human body. Martha Posner and Ricardo Barros, two artists who create narratives of heroic proportions, will be showing their extraordinary recent work at the Dalet Gallery this May. Both artists use the body or, to be more precise, creative manifestations of women’s bodies, to address larger truths. Martha Posner and Ricardo Barros have independently produced provocative works that resonate with larger ideas and with each other’s pieces. 

Superficially, Posner’s and Barros’s works could scarcely be more different. Posner assembles her pieces with fence wire, found objects, synthetic hair and beeswax, while Barros makes photographs, both color and B&W. Posner evokes metaphysical states of being with two- and three-dimensional work. Barros plays with viewer’s perceptions by using beautiful nude women to have his photographs address issues ranging from voyeurism to moral judgment. Yet both artists are meticulous in their craft, and both know how to amplify strengths in their media to tell their stories. The artists have highly distinct visions, yet they also share a common inspiration and poetic expressiveness. Their works serve as a counterbalance, and therefore a support, for one another’s perspectives.

Martha Posner, a well-known sculptor, was originally drawn to art by her need to understand what makes an object greater than its materials. She has written how “fairy tales, myths and cultures more remote than my own” inspired her early works. She has observed that her nominally empty masks and garments – motifs prominent in her earlier works - were “filled with a presence, an energy, or a memory.” Later, her attention turned to the bodily form that a spirit might take. In her most recent works, she shows us that “body” is mutable: the transformation is organic and, indeed, sometimes messy. 

In Posner’s sculpture, Turning III, a prone, female-like figure writhes in an upward twist, a gesture captured in the midst of the spirit’s bodily transformation. Posner refers to it as a “shape-shifter.” The tapering legs suggest a mermaid’s tail, except that the feet and arms are comprised of feathers, and a sparse covering of hair rises from seemingly tanned skin. “The animal and human categories are porous,” Posner says. This creature’s skin wraps her changing body like a soft membrane. Protrusions caused by developments within unavoidably alter the form without, also suggesting the mutation of a woman’s body in childbirth. 

“My art explores the deeply physical and sometimes painful process of crossing between two worlds,” Posner says. Any mother will attest that the birthing process is indeed painful. Viewers of these pieces will attest that Posner’s works are also profoundly moving.

Ricardo Barros, who has been exhibiting Fine Art photographs for thirty years, explores issues that are comparable in scale to those Posner addresses. “In photography’s early days,” he says, “the prevailing maxim was ‘Photographs don’t lie.’ Today, of course, we believe that every photograph is potentially suspect. Even so, photographs can still express truths.” The works in this show are drawn from the photographer’s portfolio, Fabricated Truths. With a wink to Edward Muybridge, who pioneered the scientific use of stop-motion photography and, in 1877, proved that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground, Barros has painted a grid on his studio wall and conducted his own, pseudo-scientific experiments. He has used the nude as a controlled variable to see what implications it might engender.

“Every one of these photographs has been staged,” Barros says. “Every one targets a different idea. The baldness with which each composition is arranged makes it possible to move beyond the limitations of fact and to reconsider what we already know from a different perspective.”

Take, for example, his explicit, highly detailed color photograph, Lineup, represented here by an alternate version of that same photograph entitled AfterImage No. 2. In it, five clothed men, facing away from the camera, stand in front of a grid-painted wall. This starkly lit image is reminiscent of a police lineup, except that we cannot possibly identify any of the men. One woman stands in their midst, facing forward. She is naked. 

What is one to make of such a tilted scenario? 

“My instructions to the model were that she be perfectly neutral,” Barros says. “I didn’t want her body language to tip the scale in any direction. Most people will get the ‘unbiased identification’ reference right away, but what matters more are the judgments that immediately follow. Is this woman a criminal? Is she a victim of the men? Is she a slut caught in the net? Is this what she deserves?”

Barros’s photographs, the viewer eventually realizes, are not really about his nudes at all. The photographer stealthily redirects our attention to a mixture of social observations and comments, as well as to our perfectly natural tendency to be voyeurs. 

Martha Posner’s work is included in a multitude of permanent collections, including those of The George Gund Foundation, The Allentown Art Museum, Lehigh University, and The Butler Museum of Art. As critic Tom Csaszar wrote of Posner’s Unfamiliar Skin series in Sculpture Magazine, her work entails “complex narrative associations that alternately move between myth and autobiography, journalism and fairy tales.” Critic Ann Landi wrote in Art News: “Posner manages to bring the theme a spooky and haunting presence, the kind of emotional rawness that characterizes the best of so-called primitive art.” Martha Posner’s web site is www.marthaposner.com.

Ricardo Barros’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of ten museums, including The Smithsonian Museum of American Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2004, Barros published an award-winning monograph, Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas. It was through this book project that Ricardo Barros first met Martha Posner. As critic Barry Schwabsky wrote in The New York Times, Barros “seems to know that a certain degree of critical tension will give liveliness and complexity to his images, but he lets that tension remain a nuance.” Sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz wrote that Barros’s book “is a work beyond categories.” Ricardo Barros’s web site is www.ricardobarros.com.

The exhibition will be on view from Apr. 30 through June 6,  2010 at the Dalet Gallery

141 North 2nd Street, Old City, Philadelphia, PA 19106.   

Gallery hours: Tue – Sat 11 am – 6 pm, Sun 12 – 5 pm.