Talia Chetrit: Gut

10 Corso Como presents Gut, the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of Talia Chetrit (1982, Washington, DC; lives and works in New York). Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Anna Castelli, and staged at the iconic Milanese concept store’s own gallery, the exhibition is part of a series that showcases artists exploring the intersections of art, lens-based media and fashion. This series began, in February 2024, with Roe Ethridge’s solo exhibition Happy Birthday Louise Parker.

Through her straightforward yet nuanced use of the camera, Chetrit draws on the history of the medium of photography while expanding contemporary notions of self-representation, sexuality and power dynamics. Fusing emotional intensity with a piercing sense of composition, her pictures are an exercise in what it means to look at an image and what it feels like to pose for the camera; an exploration of the formal implications of the act of framing and the psychological dynamics of being the subject.

Self-portraits, family scenes, still lifes, street photography–no subject is excluded from Chetrit’s critical investigation into photography’s genres. For this exhibition, the artist brings together works from 1994 to 2023, creating dialogues between various moments in both her artistic career and her private life. Recent works appear next to photographs that Chetrit took of her childhood girlfriends when she was a teenager in the mid ’90s, which she repurposes today within her current professional practice. In these “self-appropriated” pictures from the past, the subjects display a remarkable awareness of being observed and, despite their age, engage in a clear and intentional relationship with the camera, borrowing gestures and postures from fashion magazines, cinema and TV. Other early works dissect the fascination with violence and the voyeurism of crime-scene photography, embodying that mix of fragility and provocation which still distinguishes her artistic sensibility today.

Chetrit’s initial concern with the representation and self-expression of the female subject is further examined in later self-portraits, where her partly naked body is exhibited in a mix of staged exhibitionism and humorous self-parody. Turning the lens on herself, the artist elusively poses either as a domestic mime or as her own muse. Intimacy and exaggeration coexist here, in pictures that blend self-reflexivity with social commentary: the more Chetrit exposes herself, the more acutely she invites viewers to reconsider their own positions and assumptions towards female subjectivities in contemporary image production.

Familial relationships take center stage in the exhibition, with each member of the artist’s immediate family represented in situations that are awash with feelings and inner nuances. With a touch of abrasive irony, Chetrit deconstructs familial stereotypes and reveals underlying incongruities and idiosyncrasies, using fashion tropes as a tool to elicit a reflection on how we read images.

Chetrit’s art encompasses both extreme proximity and radical distance. Alongside images that are as intimate as they are confrontational, urban street pictures taken with a telephoto lens present anonymous and indistinct subjects, with the artist maintaining in these instances no connection to the events observed from afar.

Last of all, within the emotional spectrum that ranges from intimate moments to detached voyeurism, we find still lifes, in which the objects emanate a certain psychological tension. The statue of two angels embracing each other suggests the cinematic idea of love, ​​attraction and conflict, just as a rubber nipple glowing in the dark becomes a mysterious—almost threatening—object that evokes the theme of parenthood in a reduced yet provocative manner.

Talia Chetrit’s work plays with fiction and can deceptively feel diaristic at times. Her work is filled with and embraces contradictions. Each of these images invites us to reflect on the multifaceted nature of human relationships and the ways in which these dynamics are shaped, standardized, and perpetuated through the domains of representation.