August 2021
© Tarrah Krajnak, Self-Portrait as Weston/as Bertha Wardell, 1927/2020, from Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, 2020.
© Tarrah Krajnak, Self-Portrait as Weston/as Charis Wilson, 1934/2020, from the Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes series, 2020.
Aurora PhotoCenter was pleased to host Tarrah Krajnak as our August 2021 Aurora + Herron artist in residence. During her residency, Krajnak printed work from her series Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes. Darkroom access was provided by Herron School of Art + Design for the residency. A virtual talk about Master Rituals, and about artist residencies, followed in Fall 2021.
Tarrah Krajnak (tarrahkrajnak.com) is a Peruvian-born, Los Angeles based artist and educator. Her work investigates histories both cultural and personal. Her Master Rituals images deconstruct and reassemble influential photographic images and texts, creating new visual narratives. As the artist’s own images, writing, and body enter the Rituals compositions, Krajnak reimagines the photographic canon as an empowered rather than reverential space. In Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, Krajnak performs reconstructed versions of Weston images, emphasizing her authorship and control as the maker by including the camera’s trip cord in each frame. Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes was awarded The Jury Prize: The Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the 2021 Recontres Arles.
Also in 2021, Krajnak published the monograph El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, in collaboration with DAIS Books, a project that was honored with the 2020 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. El Jardín intertwines the artist’s personal history with narratives of migration and displacement, beginning in 1979, when she was adopted from an orphanage in Lima, Peru, into a working class transracial family in Pennsylvania. Krajnak writes, “This early experience of racial difference established my ongoing preoccupation with belonging, orphanhood, ancestral exile, origins, and the way these constructs are written on the body and in the archive.”
Krajnak has exhibited widely at as-is Los Angeles, Honor Fraser Gallery, Houston Center for Photography, Filter Photo Chicago, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, SF Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Photo Madrid, Photo London, Belfast Photography Festival, and Unseen Amsterdam. Her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Nueva Luz, and Strange Fire Collective among others. She received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and from the Harpo Foundation. Her work has been reviewed in Glasstire, Artforum, and Contemporary Review Los Angeles. Krajnak is an Associate Professor of Art at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, where she is also the current Director of The Munroe Center for Social Inquiry on Racial Justice.
Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Herron School of Art + Design for its generous support of this residency.
