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Carmen Argote’s Last Light, short film produced by Clockshop

Carmen Argote’s Last Light, short film produced by Clockshop

Clockshop (@clockshopla) contacted me at the beginning of quarantine to document artist Carmen Argote (@carmen.argote) on one of her regular walking routes through the city. The stills I shot of her thinking/walking practice were to be incorporated into Carmen’s short film, Last Light, that Clockshop was producing.

Last Lightis a meditation on walking and memory in Los Angeles. The film…

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Summer Artist Residency in Havana, Cuba! Good news this morning: my summer artist residency application in Havana, Cuba was ✨ACCEPTED✨! I will be spending the first half of July working on a photo project that has been simmering on the back burners of my mind for the last 3 years since my mother passed.

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Tanya Aguiñiga, 'Borderlands Within' Opening Reception at the Armory Center for the Arts A big thank you to everyone who came out to the opening reception of Borderlands Within, an exhibition for…

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A PRACTICAL WEDDING (APW) BLOG FEATURE! 2020

A PRACTICAL WEDDING (APW) BLOG FEATURE! 2020

A Practical Wedding wrote such a great article about me on their blog last month! They really dug deep and even included my other photography work! Still have a few openings in my calendar left for 2020 weddings, and I’m also doing a free wedding giveaway too. ⚡️

Read the post for yourself: https://apracticalwedding.com/gina-clyne-photography-los-angeles/

(more…)

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Performance: Tanya Aguiñiga, Metabolizing the Border, January 2020

Performance: Tanya Aguiñiga, Metabolizing the Border, January 2020

Here are the photos I shot for Tanya Aguiñiga’s performance, Metabolizing the Border, January 2020, at the Otay, CA/Tijuana, Mexico border. Tanya’s solo exhibition ‘Borderlands Within’ just opened at Armory Center for the Artsin Pasadena and runs through August of 2020. Come check out the exhibit, which includes these photos I took of her performance. For 1.5 hours, Tanya walked back and forth…

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ONE FREE WEDDING IN 2020 TO THE CHILD OF AN IMMIGRANT!

ONE FREE WEDDING IN 2020 TO THE CHILD OF AN IMMIGRANT!

Images above: All taken in Havana, Cuba — 1. My grandmother (right) sits with my great aunt (left), with my mother on her lap, 2. my mother as a little girl, posed on a coffee table, 3. my grandfather, “Francisco” Lee.

I am offering free photography for one wedding to a person in a couple (or both) who was the child of an immigrant. The immigrant story is integral to my identity and I want to…

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I'm coming' Japan!

I’m coming’ Japan!

I’m grateful for the little business I built, ✨Gina Clyne Photography✨, for many reasons, but recently I’m grateful for it’s healing powers (giving me an avenue to heal through image making), and for being a vehicle to see the world. I’m thrilled to say that I will be shooting Cailin & Lucas’ wedding in Fukuoka, Japan 🇯🇵 next March. What an honor it will be to document the place that Lucas grew…

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Photos now on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography: W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine (Oct 5-Dec 29, 2019)

Photos now on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography: W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine (Oct 5-Dec 29, 2019)

Last week was a really special one for me. Photographs I took during a 3 year period at the US/Mexico border (spanning from California through Texas) with AMBOS Project and Tanya Aguiñiga opened in a new exhibit W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine at the Annenberg Space for Photography.

Complex, challenging, and immersive, W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine is a historical look at…

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Ruth Reichl in Conversation with KCRW's Evan Kleiman

Ruth Reichl in Conversation with KCRW’s Evan Kleiman

Photos I shot of Ruth Reichl in conversation with 🎙KCRW’s Evan Kleiman🎙at Annenberg Performance Studio at KCRW HQ. It was a lovely evening with celebrated author, chef, and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, who spoke candidly about her time as the Editor of Gourmet magazine (the subject of her new book Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir). It’s always a treat to get to document and sit in as people…

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WØM's Valentine’s Day BINGO Extravaganza Fundraising Event

WØM’s Valentine’s Day BINGO Extravaganza Fundraising Event

Some photos I shot last February of Women’s Øpposition Movement (@wom_la) second annual Valentine’s Day BINGO extravaganza at Zebulon! They raised $4,200 for Alexandria House (@alexandriahousela) who provides safe and supportive housing for women and children in Los Angeles. Hosted by Neil Hamburger, Bobcat Goldthwait, Megan Koester & Anna Seregina, and amazing prizes donated by so many awesome…

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Allie & Naoki's Private Prehistoric Forest Ceremony in the Heart of Los Angeles

Allie & Naoki’s Private Prehistoric Forest Ceremony in the Heart of Los Angeles

Allie & Naoki planned a small ceremony with only family in attendance at the Los Angeles County Arboretum (@laarboretum) in Arcadia. I remember keenly how they both wandered for a few minutes in the ����Prehistoric Forest🌿 before deciding on the spot that felt right for their ceremony. They rounded out the day by inviting a small group of friends to celebrate with them at the Side Bar at Covell (@ba…

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Jails and Justice project for USC Arts in Action

Jails and Justice project for USC Arts in Action

Looking back on photos I took of Jails and Justice for USC Arts in Action (@usc_artsinaction). This project brought together USC students, Black Lives Matter (@blmlosangeles), and the Institute of Theatre and Social Change (@uscsda) — all who are committed to reimagining policing, incarceration and public safety. The two new performances took place at California African American Museum (@caaminla

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Alison & John’s Intimate Ojai Backyard Wedding

Alison & John’s Intimate Ojai Backyard Wedding

It makes total sense to me that you’d get married and celebrate in a place that feels like home. In this case, Alison & John married in the home of Alison’s contemporary dance mentor, and ate dinner with all their family and friends at tables that were planted amongst her backyard fruit trees. 🍋 It’s that kind of abundance that makes you feel full and thankful for a long time afterwards.

Venue…

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Above image: Ana Mendieta, Film stills, Sweating Blood, 1973

Starting in July, my birth month, I will be doing a bi-monthly research exercise on “Cuban Heroes” for my blog. I believe that seeing yourself reflected in the world around you (in pop culture and beyond) is powerful, and I was starved of that privilege as a young girl navigating the white-centric suburbs of Orange County.

A bit of an introduction before beginning — My mother immigrated from Cuba in the 1970s and married my father, a red headed Irish-American from Southern California. Growing up, my contact with my father’s side of the family was rare if ever, so I made sense of “family” through the connection I had to my mother’s side: my Cuban Grandmother and her sisters (my Great Aunts). I truly believe that I understand what Love is today through the love I received from the gaggle of Cuban women who raised me as a child. Looking back, when I think of “home”, I think of them, and feel them deeply in my core still. So with all that said — why is it that when I was sorting through the building blocks of my identity and searching for role models, that I looked past them and only found value and importance in white-stories by straight-white-men within the framework of white-society? In short, it is because I was a child of an immigrant, and cultural assimilation was key to my social survival. When I looked around me, those were the narratives that society held up and gave the most worth and I followed that way of thinking without ever examining why (that would come decades later). As a child and young adult, I took these adopted narratives and hid in plain sight. My fair-skin and culturally-ambiguous looks afforded me that. I thought by doing this, I was pushing myself out of the ethnic minority and giving myself a “fair chance”, a belief that is complex, problematic, and reinforced time and time again in my life.

After my mother’s passing 2 years ago, I spiraled into grief. Grieving her, and the loss of “the last” of my Cuban identity slipping through my fingers and into the ether. Never again would I feel and hear the energy and sounds of her hard Cuban-Spanish accenting my life. The audible sounds of love through language, calling for me as, “Ginita”. I think after the death of any parent, it is quite normal to question existence and ask questions of “why”, and that definitely came for me in full force and is something I still reconcile today. So — this is to honor my Mother, this is for my Grandmother and Great Aunts, but mostly this is for the little girl who needed an extra push in understanding her roots, her place and their natural value, and in turn, her natural value.

  Ana Mendieta (November 18, 1948 – September 8, 1985) was a Cuban-born performance artist, sculptor, video artist and painter who immigrated to the United States when she was only 12 years old to escape Fidel Castro’s regime.

Through her art, Mendieta transformed fear, pain, and rage into powerful and provocative meditations on gender, identity, assault, death, place, and belonging.

As an immigrant, Mendieta felt a disconnect in the United States. The trauma of being uprooted from her Cuban homeland as a girl would leave her with questions about her identity and make her more conscious of being a woman of color.

These questions would echo in her work, which explored themes that pushed ethnic, sexual, moral, religious and political boundaries. She urged viewers to disregard their gender, race or other defining societal factors and instead connect with the humanity they share with others.

Ana Mendieta, Imágen de Yágul, 1973/2018. Color photograph. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Mendieta created a diverse collection of work (“earth-body” art) that included silhouettes of her body created in mud, earth, rocks, wild flowers and leaves, performance pieces that evoked the folk and occult traditions of her native Cuba as well as her beloved Mexico and subversive self-portraits that played with notions of beauty, belonging and gender.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976 Photograph © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC,Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

Ana Mendieta, Alma, Silueta en Fuego, 1975 Photograph © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC,Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

The artist’s Silueta Series photographs, help us to think about the history of Mendieta’s marked absence, the notion of the trace of an end or an incomplete whole in her presentation of earth/body symbiosis.

Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood, 1973. Stills from Super-8mm.

In her performance pieces, where she sometimes used blood “as a very, powerful magical thing”, she evoked the power of female sexuality as well as the horror of male sexual violence. In her photographic self-portraits, she pressed her face against glass to distort her features or pictured herself dripping in blood or disguised as a man with glued-on facial hair.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints – Face), 1972

“When we speak of feminism, it’s important to know that anytime a woman, especially a beautiful woman uses her body and distorts it, it is, in essence, a political act. So often women are the subject of the male gaze, all over art history. That’s what we see – women as object – and here, Mendieta like many women of her generation are transposing that relationship to make women a subject of her own gaze and therefore of our gaze and that it’s a very empowering step.”  -Marie Sabbatino

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks), 1974

In Body Tracks, Mendieta makes track-like marks, trails of blood that drag from her forearms, drawing a downward movement like bloodshed which, when it ends, leaves the viewer staring at the remains of the action, transformed into performative text. The work involving the body takes on a sacrificial quality while at the same time providing a radical way of presenting the subjectivity with which lifeblood itself becomes a painting pigment. Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) is closely linked to other actions using blood done in the early 1970s, such as those she recorded in the privacy of her own home as a reflection on other private kinds of violence.

Cuban Heroes (I wish I’d known as a girl): Ana Mendieta Above image: Ana Mendieta, Film stills, Sweating Blood, 1973 Starting in July, my birth month, I will be doing a bi-monthly research exercise on "Cuban Heroes" for my blog.

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Into the ground, Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder, 2018/2019

I had the honor of documenting this collaborative sculpture by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder for Clockshop, now on view at the Bowtie Project.

This project was originally commissioned for The Socrates Annual at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Into the ground reflects on how urban ecologies uptake and transform contaminants, and how collective bodies realize agency through ground-up organizing. At Socrates, this sculpture engaged with the park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park, and in Los Angeles, it will draw similar parallels to the Bowtie’s transformation-in-progress.

For the sculpture’s west coast debut, Riley and Snyder have adapted the structure to include a seat, re-upholstered with a rust-dyed cover made during participatory workshops at Socrates. During these workshops, attendees excavated iron objects from the park and participated in a communal rust-dye to produce an abstracted imprint of discarded material. This process highlights practices of use, abandonment, and alchemical transformations over time.

Joe Riley & Audrey Snyder are collaborators with one another and the artist collective Futurefarmers. Their art combines the poetic, political, and practical as a point of entry to explore dense interactions of urban and rural concourses, human and nonhuman forms. The work is context-specific and collaborative in (and with) nature. Their material-based practice attends to the connectivity of ecology and infrastructures: finding expression as sculpture, installation, and public engagements. Tangled in the knotty togetherness of geological time and political urgencies, this work proceeds with the hope of grasping the past in order to excite the present and future.

This project’s installation in Los Angeles is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Into the ground, Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder, 2018/2019 Into the ground, Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder, 2018/2019 I had the honor of documenting this collaborative sculpture by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder for…

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The end of 2018 brought me a few last minute Beverly Hills courthouse weddings that I was happy to document. Looking through these photos after a couple months have past has me remembering Enjie’s energy and her contagious smile, amplified by the day’s events. Congratulations guys!

    Enjie & Andy’s Beverly Hills Courthouse Wedding The end of 2018 brought me a few last minute Beverly Hills courthouse weddings that I was happy to document.

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I’m happy to share some photos I shot last month for Craft Contemporary of Beatriz & Rafa’s collaborative installation, Nomad 13, on view now through May 12th, 2019!

Los Angeles-based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza present the collaborative installation, Nomad 13 in the museum’s first floor. Taking the form of an unconventional space capsule built from adobe bricks and steel, the structure houses a garden of plants that are indigenous to the Americas and were cultivated by the Inca, Maya, and Aztec civilizations. The garden refers to a long history of plant migration, as well as the knowledge and technological advances of ancient peoples. In symbolically “launching” these plants into the cosmos, the artists evoke the real ongoing experiments of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to grow food in outer space. However, with Nomad 13 the artists envision the growth of fresh food in space for the survival of indigenous knowledge and to nourish future space travelers.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Installation Photos: Beatriz Cortez & Rafa Esparza, Nomad 13 I'm happy to share some photos I shot last month for Craft Contemporary of Beatriz & Rafa’s collaborative installation, … 167 more words