Interview with Farrah Karapetian | Ken Weingart Art & Photography Blog

By Ken Weingart on November 18, 2015

Farrah Karapetian is a renowned Los Angeles based conceptual artist who creates stunning imagery through photograms or “cameraless” photography. She studied as an undergraduate at Yale University and received her MFA at UCLA. She just concluded an exhibition at Danziger Gallery in New York City and looks forward to her second exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles in January 2016.

When did you first think of becoming an artist?

It’s true. The majority of my practice involves cameraless  photographs – or “photograms” – and the making of sculptural negatives  en route to their exposure. My sculptural negatives are  three-dimensional objects the bodies of which operate according to the  logic of light. I am not at all interested in the cameraless photograph  as such, however; my practice is not driven by anachronism. I am  interested in how images exist in the world, and a lot of my cameraless  work examines existing photographs and reimagines the way that they  circulate. Cameralessness makes that process of reimagining more  physical and present and drawn out for me than do other photographic  processes. In a sense, however, you could say that if I am influenced to  make a cameraless photograph from a photograph I’ve seen circulating  online, that cameraless photograph originates from a photograph taken  with someone’s camera.

Read full interview here

 

You are known for creating “cameraless” art. Does any of the work originate from a camera?



It’s true. The majority of my practice involves cameraless photographs – or “photograms” – and the making of sculptural negatives en route to their exposure. My sculptural negatives are three-dimensional objects the bodies of which operate according to the logic of light. I am not at all interested in the cameraless photograph as such, however; my practice is not driven by anachronism. I am interested in how images exist in the world, and a lot of my cameraless work examines existing photographs and reimagines the way that they circulate. Cameralessness makes that process of reimagining more physical and present and drawn out for me than do other photographic processes. In a sense, however, you could say that if I am influenced to make a cameraless photograph from a photograph I’ve seen circulating online, that cameraless photograph originates from a photograph taken with someone’s camera.

Beyond Muscle Memory: An Interview with Farrah Karapetian | Georgia Review

By The Georgia Review On November 4, 2015 · In Interviews 

By The Georgia Review On November 4, 2015 · In Interviews

 
Artist Farrah Karapetian’s oeuvre intensely engages the art of photogramming as she locates emotional weight in the physical making of her often politically rooted subject material. In the case of Muscle Memory, featured in our Fall 2015 issue, Karapetian’s focus, as indicated, is the muscle memory of U.S. Armed Forces veterans and their relationships to their weapons. With clear resin, the artist created three casts each of the veterans’ typical sidearm (P226 Sig Sauer) and rifle (H&K416), produced multiple photograms from those, and then orchestrated the veterans into military postures, where they would remain stock-still with their prop weapons while 1:1 scale images were rendered behind them.
In this interview, Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries Director Katie Geha—who worked with Karapetian during her recent artist-in-residence stint at the Dodd—engages Karapetian in an in-depth discussion of the physical and philosophical practices that go into making her photograms.

(To view the Muscle Memory portfolio and to read managing editor  

Jenny Gropp’s introduction to the project, head here.)

***** 
Katie Geha: How do you choose the objects that you work with?

Farrah Karapetian: I don’t, or at least if I choose to work with an object, the identity and nature of that object are choices inherited primarily from the people or places that move me.
In the case of the body of work I call Accessory to Protest, the eight objects I worked with were listed on page four of a flyer distributed in Egypt before the protests that ostensibly brought down Hosni Mubarak in 2013. They were described as the accessories one might need in order to perform the act of protest, among them a “sweatshirt or leather jacket with a hood” that “helps shield your face from tear gas” and “spray paint so that if the authorities attack us, we can spray paint the visors of their helmets and the windshields of the armored trucks, blocking their vision and hindering their movement.” I was fascinated with this list and this document in general, which seemed like already a false artifact of the Arab Spring even as protests continued. How can one really instruct a populace in the art of civil disobedience, even with a checklist of accessories?
I remade the document itself as a photogram at life size so that it might be experienced more phenomenologically, text and all. A potent part of that process was remaking the objects—banal, every one of them—as clear sculptures to be used as negatives that would conduct light and therefore translate volume onto the photographic picture plane. Remaking the objects as negatives is a mimetic act and a first step of intentional encounter with the subject. It is also the first photographic act, insofar as the objects are remade according to the logic of light and truth.