Gallery on Old Bailey

Rudensky was born in Moscow and is a gradute of the MFA Yale Photography Program. Her recent solo show in New York consisted of a large series of works from her Demons series of which four pieces will be on display at Gallery on Old Bailey. Below is her artist statement about this work:

This body of work came out of a desire to create a fantastical rather than a truthful version of my childhood, a hybrid world that is simultaneously theatrical and lived-in. I found that memory and cultural past can be and are a kind of fiction, or at least a highly manipulated version of a truth. Using relatives and friends I have been constructing portraits with a strong emphasis on gesture. Something as simple as brushing hair away from one’s face or taking off a shirt becomes a complex psychological investigation. The inexhaustible set of motives surrounding each one of these simple acts inundates each moment with an atmosphere of possibility and each character with a life, with a past and a future. Besides the gesture of the subject I’m also considering the photographic gesture, the unexpected detail in the texture of the skin, the joining of the teeth and the gums, the wrinkles on the neck, that only photography can do. The physical rendering of bodies in these pictures constitutes an element of surprise for me that is not anticipated and exciting. When the pictures come together as a series, I see these moments as a kind of opera– a distillation of artifice and raw emotion. The latter is what is most important to me – to make a portrait that stands apart from the highly formal and clinical way of photographing people that has dominated contemporary photography, by soliciting a real emotional commitment and engagement on the part of the viewer.