Photographers Tania Franco Klein and Lucia Fainzilber are appearing at Phillips for the first time—both with images that are not so much self-portraits as portraits of Selfhood. The two artists are intensely interdisciplinary and somewhat peripatetic (Franco Klein has lived between Mexico City, California, and London; Buenos-Aires-born Fainzilber works in New York). And their respective works, Plane (Self-portrait) and Untitled 31, reflect the simultaneous confusion, protection, and yearning of an identity-in-progress, rather than one already formed.
Before moving into photography professionally, Lucia Fainzilber worked in cinematic post-production and color correcting. The artist cites color as her creative entrée—and her passion—from an early age. In an interview, she reminisced, “Since I was a little kid, I had a passion for color. I had phases I dressed in pink, another in black, another in green, and everything I chose was around those colors. The red from Dorothy’s Wizard of Oz shoes stuck in my memory for a long time.”
Her self-portrait series, Somewear, embraces this long-held passion for color, while also insisting on something insecure, even prickly, around her identity. She began the series during her third year of living in New York—a city that represents, for Fainzilber, constant change. “It makes you want new things all the time,” she has noted, “as if your capability to adapt to changes would be a kind of evolution.” Untitled 31, which is lush with pattern, fabric, and optical illusion, incorporates pink, red, and green florals as a kind of camouflage. Even though it is the only image in the series in which Fainzilber faces the camera, Fainzilber disguises her face with a well-placed cactus. In Untitled 31, identity is conflicting and evolving—as well as vibrant and alluring.
