» Gesture 08

Swiss photography artist Regis Golay’s work both confronts and accepts a relationship between clients and photographers. Human bodies appear in a dispassionate and often subservient relation to the surrounding products: peering out, being consumed, or passively serving as framing devices. In his videos, objects are mobile or formidable, interacting with static or impotent bodies. The ability to instantly capture a subject, and the photograph’s tendency, more so than other artworks, to attach this representation to its entire referent, is deliberate and problematic. We don’t imagine ourselves as condensable into one image, yet we carry totemic images of others in our wallets or on our phones, standing in for and compromising the person’s whole. figures, forms, contraptions emphasises this selective portrayal, extracting visual and narrative distortions from an apparently non-fictive medium. (Text courtesy of the artist)