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Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (b. 1979 in Tbilisi) is a Georgian-American artist working at the intersection of digital and analog photography. While some of her experimental compositions arise out of spontaneously captured moments, others are the result of carefully staged scenes, manipulated through various means to raise questions around representation and image production.In addition to her participation in Capitain Petzel's current group exhibition The Displacement Effect, the artist is currently presenting her photographic project Georgian Ornaments, which was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021, at the annual photography festival Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, France.
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The Displacement Effect
Curated by Kirsty Bell with Jochum Rodgers | Until 22 August 2021Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili is featured prominently in our current group show with two floor-to-ceiling photographic draperies which form semi-transparent thresholds of ambiguous, subliminal imagery between the further furniture, textile and art objects featured in the exhibition. These site-specific curtains are printed photograms, whose incidental lines and shapes are the result of a manual manipulation of the negative through folding and scratching, creating the visible residue of the artist's intervention.
KETUTA ALEXI-MESKHISHVILI
I am your slice, 2021
Inkjet print on organic cotton
Dimensions variable, site-specific
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Alexi-Meskhishvili is interested in depicting the feeling of instability and the “sensation of losing boundaries”, relating in a personal sense to her experiences of emigrating from Georgia to the US in her childhood and later the sensation of new motherhood, but also more generally to the inherent qualities of image creation; the tension and boundary between what is actually being depicted and the staging of images which ultimately determines their meaning.
KETUTA ALEXI-MESKHISHVILI
Danama, 2021Inkjet print on organic cottonDimensions variable, site-specific -
What made me love photography was its boundary problems: how the ambiguous power of decisions such as composition, editing, framing, circulation and presentation of an image tends to determine the meaning more than that which is being depicted. Or, for example, the opaqueness of boundaries between the depicted and depicter that are easily blurred by the dynamics of power. These tendencies allow photography a vast, mysterious area for an artist to investigate and play in.
—Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Objektiv #20, 2020
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The extensive visual media consumption that forms a large part of contemporary life often also results in the dissolving of mental boundaries, as images amalgamate in our minds and bleed into one another. This disorientation is reflected in photographic works such as patterns of an unstable frame and Heinrich-Heine Straße in which images merge, forming assemblages with unclear borders. Alexi-Meskhishvili’s compositions subtly weave together analog and digital photographic practices: in patterns of an unstable frame, the hazy imagery is the product of the artist capturing the image through a semi-sheer barrier of textile, while the visuals of Heinrich Heine Straße are superimposed and collaged digitally in Photoshop. The medial-material aspects are foregrounded through retaining of the edges of the negatives in the final print, complete with the laboratory perforation, which in pattern of an unstable frame has additionally been supplemented in digital post-processing with another silver, kitschy-looking frame.
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A manifestation of the dissolution of physical boundaries can be seen in for any one of you, which depicts an artificial body part seemingly swimming in milky white liquid. This effect is produced through exposing the object onto a negative, producing a photogram through light exposure and thereby capturing an image without a camera. With its warm, soft gradient of colors, the image is both pleasurable and intimate, yet latently uncanny and synthetic. The work exemplifies how Alexi-Meskhishvili makes use of photography to reflect on the atomization of the body, alluding to the loss of unity and stability enhanced by increasingly popular methods of modification and enhancements, for instance through digital image processing, face filters or physical augmentation.
KETUTA ALEXI-MESKHISHVILI
for any one of you, 2021
Archival pigment print
185 x 152 cm / 72.8 x 59.8 inches
Unframed
Edition of 1 (#1/1) + 1 AP -
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Vine, from the Georgian Ornament series, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021
On view at Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles | Until 29 August 2021Familiar and impersonal at the same time, the plastic bag is at the center of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili’s most recent work. The artist, fascinated by an object both fragile and enduringly pollutive, has for several years collected specimens of what she calls a « future fossil ». In the country of Georgia, where she was born, a number of these bags intended for tourist consumption display traditional ornamental motifs, similar to those you find in Byzantine churches.
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Watch the artist talking about her series 'Georgian Ornament'
Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili: Shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021: On view at Capitain Petzel & Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles
Current viewing_room
