Re-Presenting the Portrait @ Irvine Contemporary

Kerry Skarbakka & Marla Rutherford: Re-Presenting the Portrait, now on view at Irvine Contemporary, features a fantastic pairing of photographers, whose works are extraordinarily similar in theme. Both artists are working with the photographic image as performance – all carefully staged and performative in execution.

In Kerry Skarbakka’s series The Struggle to Right Oneself, the artist stages scenes that dissect the concepts of control and perception of balance. He casts himself in the leading role to create these performative self-portraits, snapped during his often private productions with no real onlookers. From his grungy shower, where you can almost smell the soapscum and hear the silver shower rings jangling from their rod, to his Brooklyn studio, Skarbakka shows himself teetering on a life-or-death disaster. You catch yourself saying, "well, maybe he’ll just break an arm."

The photographs record moments of actual physical danger for the artist, who has taken falls and created physically hazardous sets to position his body just so. A magician never reveals his secrets, but he safeguards particularly demanding stunts with a trapeze-like wire (that are later digitally erased) to capture just the right moment of peril. To better inform this series, Skarbakka invokes the words of existentialist Martin Heidegger, who described existence as struggling to catch oneself after being thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities. The Struggle to Right Oneself hits the nail on this philosophic head, reminding us to hold onto the handrail and brace for the ever-present uncertainty.