James Nares: Portraits

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce James Nares: PORTRAITS, an exhibition of eleven new videos on view from March 3 – April 23, 2016 at 293 Tenth Avenue, New York. PORTRAITS debuts the artist’s first body of video work since he created his iconic video STREET in 2011. In his latest works, the relationship of the camera to the subject is switched as the he changes his role from street photographer to portraitist.

Using a camera specifically developed by Fastec Imaging to have cinematic applications as well as the technical and scientific for which they are best known, the artist captured sitters including Amy Taubin Douglas Crimp, Glenn O’Brien, Jim Jarmusch, Walter Robinson and his daughters, Sasha, Zarina and Jahanara, against a simple backdrop allowing the viewer to focus entirely on the subject.

Filmed at several hundred frames per second, each video ranges between eleven and thirty-five minutes in length and is displayed on close to life-sized, ultra-high definition monitors that render minute details with infinite precision and reveal a boundless complexity of thoughts, emotions, and movement. By engaging the subject with the lens, Nares deepens the viewers sense of connection with the work, and offers an opportunity to observe the sitter in a way that may owe more to painting than still photography.  “A still photograph is a lie,” says the artist. “People are not merely a single moment in time.”

JAMES NARES (b. 1953 in London, lives and works in New York)
Nares’ films and videos reference many of the same preoccupations with time, movement, rhythm and repetition as his paintings while also ranging further afield in their scope. His work is included in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2008, Anthology Film Archives hosted a complete retrospective of his films and videos titled James Nares: Motion Pictures. In 2013, Nares’ film STREET was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and since has been featured in the New Frontier program at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and exhibited at institutions including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, CT. In Spring 2014, Rizzoli published the first monograph dedicated to James Nares’ work in all media over the last four decades.