Phoenix Art Museum exhibit explores the body through photography
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
"Gabriels and Shields Square Up Round 1" by Terrell Groggins. Photo: Courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum
The Phoenix Art Museum will debut a photography exhibit in January that explores the empowerment and limitations of the human body.
The big picture: "Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body" defies historical art tropes of nude, posed images with a collection of archival and contemporary photographs that examine how our bodies reveal and conceal our inner beings, curator Emilia Mickevicius told Axios.
What they're saying: "It's an inescapable fact that each of us moves through the world in a body. We have differences in appearance, ability and lived experience, but we all share this fundamental condition of embodiment," she said.
Zoom in: The exhibition, which opens Jan. 24, will be split into four sections:
🤚 "Surface Tension"
What can you tell by looking at someone? Visitors will explore how the skin tells stories and how people use tattoos, makeup and markings to alter their outward appearance.
- Mickevicius said she hopes the images capture how "deeply human it is to want to look at different people."
🪞 "Know Thyself"
Self-portraiture is the crux of this installment, which features photographs of artists contemplating their mortality, Mickevicius told us.
- She said Rosalind Fox Solomon's self-portrait series is the work she's most excited for visitors to see.
- Solomon, who died in June, photographed herself in her later years for an "unflinching" and "vulnerable" look at aging.
⛹️♀️ "Kinetic Tension"
Motion photography is on full display in this collection, which includes images by 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, one of the pioneers of cinema, who captured his own body in motion on film.
- On the contemporary side, there's an iconic photograph of a 1993 meeting between the Phoenix Suns and the Chicago Bulls by Walter Ioos, featuring Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.
💪 "Enduring"
This section showcases how photographers "use the medium to explore everything that the body endures and how the body holds memory," Mickevicius said.
- It features several active Arizona-based photographers, including Anh-Thuy Nguyen, a photography professor at Pima Community College.
- Nguyen's work, called "Thuy and T.," is a video of her donning a traditional yellow Vietnamese dress and boxing with an unseen enemy. It's meant to illustrate the internal struggle between her American and Vietnamese identities, according to her website.
The intrigue: The exhibition blends canonical images with new artistry and technology to show how "themes thread from historical work into our present moment," Mickevicius said.
- Most of the images come from UofA's Center for Creative Photography — North America's pre-eminent photography archive, where Mickevicius also serves as a curator.
If you go: "Muscle Memory: Lens on the Body" will be on display in the Norton Photography Gallery through June 28. Entrance is included with museum admission.