Grain by Rachel Rillo
Opening Reception: Nov. 18 (Wednesday) 6-9PMSilverlens Gallery
Rachel Rillo Breaks It Down With ‘GRAIN’
Rachel Rillo opens her latest photography exhibit, ‘GRAIN,’ on November 18, 6pm at Silverlens Gallery.
Her latest work is a meditation on paring things down to their material source: plaster, wood, plastic. Objects photographed are small figures that are visual representations of something real. With the use of light alone, Rillo intentionally alters and deletes backgrounds and other contextual hints. Size, the environment and any other relationship the object photographed could have outside of the material from which it is made and what it symbolizes has been negated.
“Photographically, this particular work was a challenge because I had to get rid of all clues surrounding the object. The task was to make the photographs as minimal as I could get them to be without touching them up or altering them with light,” says Rillo.
GRAIN is a glimpse into the quiet truths in the most basic of equations. A cube with a triangular top is instantly a symbol of a house. A rounded figure on a shaft is a bust symbolizing a human form.
There are installations of photographs of religious iconography paired with a small plastic bag of ground, melted, pulverized, and pulped material. Assuming that the bag holds part of the subject, the photographer posits the questions: Has the idol, icon, or symbol lost its meaning? Is it sacrilege? Is it a gram of dirt or a holy gram?
GRAIN is a meditation on the elusive gestures of form and material - the nuanced expression, the violent confrontation, the abandoned and scarred. It is a reflection of the disjunctive spaces between symbolism and spirituality, memory and possession.
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