tamara suarez porras
class of 2018
about
tamara suarez porras is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY. She is currently pursuing a dual MFA/MA at CCA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies. Her cross-disciplinary practice is grounded in the photograph and spans across installation, writing, filmmaking, and performance. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, School at the International Center of Photography, En Foco, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace and Embark Gallery in San Francisco, CA.
tamara’s thesis
(RE)ARRANGING PICTURES AND (RE)READING HISTORIES: LESLIE HEWITT AND PACIFICO SILANO
(re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories examines the work of artists Leslie Hewitt and Pacifico Silano through Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory. Hewitt’s Still Life is a photographic series of assemblages that consider collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Hewitt arranges a library of archival materials in the studio which manifest as large-scale photographs. In the photobook Tear Sheets, Silano photographs arrangements of print ephemera from queer pornography of the 1970s and 1980s. This work explores lost queer kinship and generational relationships from the losses to HIV-AIDS. The recontextualization and (re)arrangements of pictures and objects in both artists’ works are active processes of remembering: ways to read histories, evolve them, and keep them alive. These works address the absences within and slippages of personal and collective memory through archival research, formal qualities of the photographic object, and photo-sculptural arrangements.