© Elizabeth Preger
Kathmandu Photo Gallery 87 Pan road 10500 Bangkok Thaïlande
Kathmandu Photo Gallery presents « Here are my teeth: Black with stars », a photographic exhibition by Elizabeth Preger.
How do you photograph bodily sensations and our preprogrammed cellular decay? Elizabeth Preger’s sensitive, sombre work instantly brings to mind the Thai Buddhist death meditation mantra: “It shrinks; it swells,” a simple description of the process undergone by the flesh when it dies.
Extreme close-ups of vulnerable naked body parts convey fleshy sensations; a hand with mottled nail varnish lightly fingers a hairy navel; downy feathers scattered across a female torso; the bone-like calcium textures of seashells worn smooth by the bearing might of sea and wind, bleached by the sun, carefully collected in a white porcelain bowl with a soft raised pattern of bending leaves. Beside each image of life, its reverse: the nipple covered with make-up in ‘life’ is now stained black, the nipple of a corpse; the pristine bowl of shells is marred by black grease, evoking ecological disaster, death as the stinking oil slick that suffocates all life and defaces beauty. There is no religious surrender here; only fear powerfully envisioned and endured.
© Elizabeth Preger
© Elizabeth Preger
Elizabeth Preger (b. 1988 Los Angeles, CA) earned a BA in Art from UCLA in 2010. Her practice focuses on ideas of mythmaking as well as photography's historical relationship to mortality and place. In 2012 Elizabeth had a solo show at Artery Post Modern Gallery in Thailand. Her work has also been included in exhibitions curated by Mark Allen and Anne Ellegwood, published in the LA times and LA weekly and featured at Photo L.A. 2013 and 2014 as a part of Emerging Focus.