frisette
september 16 october 16, 2010

vERNISSAGE
saturday sept 18, 2010 2pm - 5pm

robyn cumming /

Robyn Cumming’s most recent series of photographic works are presented in Frisette, her first solo exhibition at Galerie PUSH from September 16 to October 16 2010. Cumming describes a frisette as a “kind of stand in for the whole”, a characteristic she finds in this small curl of (often artificial) hair, worn on the forehead of a woman. The frisette functions as both ornament and artefact and serves as the title to this exhibition because for Cumming, it identifies something that exists independently while having the ability to somehow embody those who wear it. The frisette’s capacity to bear a defining characteristic of a specific somebody lingers even as the body is removed. 

Robyn Cumming assembles something familiar yet strange, seductive but uncomfortable in this photographic series.Taking cues from old stock photography, cliché nature photographs, and traditional studio portraits, Cumming makes light of both our relationship to our own materiality and its manifestation as a photographic image. Between the poles of subject and object is where the crux of Cumming’s imagery lies; the perceived individual has become a prop, staged amongst a strange and decorative facade. An indication of a lifeless commercial style informs her work while modes of presentation that are laden with sentimentality and pathos remain. The poignancy of the work presented in Frisette is its oscillation between real and imagined, the dislocation of the event from its context and the inadequacies of image and memory.

GALERIE PUSH 372 SAINTe catherine ouest / suite 425 / MONTRÉAL QC canada
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Robyn Cumming Sunrise Portrait 5:48AM 2010, c-print, 40" x 32" (101cm x 81.3cm) ed. 5 + 2AP