Tarrah Krajnak: RePose

RePose is a collection of close to 60 self-portraits made by the artist Tarrah Krajnak over the course of long-duration, studio-based live performances that incorporate an onsite darkroom, lighting studio, and an installation of xeroxed images of hundreds of examples of “women’s poses”. Krajnak sources these “women’s poses” from her own personal collection and from site specific archival research– they come from fashion, vintage pornographic magazines, artist monographs, art history books, museum catalogs, and anthropological studies that span centuries and continents. Over the course of these live performances, Krajnak chooses poses from among these images to “re-pose” using her own indigenous body, slowly producing a series of new self-portraits in real time. At the end of each day, she develops and prints the exposed film in the on-site darkroom, and then hangs the resulting silver gelatin prints next to its source image. For the first time, these self-portraits are printed here in book form, separated from their original source material; they now collectively build a new typology of “women’s poses”. In the closing essay titled Picture a Woman, the American photographer Justine Kurland writes “turning the pages of RePose, those images mapping on top of each other like a flip-book, animating Tarrah’s marionette-like movements and stuttering to life. We might think of the Greek root of the word “archive” itself, meaning “beginning, origin, first place,”and imagine Tarrah restaging her own birth, willing herself into being and rising out of the archive, hobbled together from the very stuff of her own exclusion like the undead of a Frankenstein’s monster. Tarrah dances over the archive, her form a singular, snaking aggregate containing a chorus of women’s poses.”