Lundi 01 Décembre 2014 11:08:17 par actuphoto dans Expositions

For her Swim series, Francine Fleischer photographed recreational swimmers enjoying the refreshing waters of a Mexican cenote. Underground caverns such as this form when the collapse of limestone bedrock exposes the groundwater underneath. It is thought that the Mayans used these sites for sacred rituals, infusing the cenote—and, subsequently, Fleischer’s images of it—with a sense of the magic and mystery of what came before. The artist’s large, Caravaggio-esque photographic prints are also mesmerizing objects in-and-of themselves, as Fleischer transforms scenes from a popular tourist destination into seductive compositions of colorful human forms contrasted against the cenote’s dark waters, enticing viewers into the beautiful, murky depths of each image.

“When I look down on the swimmers in these inky waters, it is a bit like looking down the rabbit hole into another world. Sometimes it is an allegorical scene illustrating my subterranean dreams, other times I am a merely a voyeur, capturing the body politics and random scenarios, the contradictions of light and dark, levity and gravity, reality and revery, tribulations and joy and of course sinking and swimming. Each time I return here, I am drawn in by these contradictions, the human conversations and the random choreography below.”