McCord 2018: Marisa Portolese

IN THE STUDIO WITH NOTMAN

AN EXHIBITION OF ARTIST IN RESIDENCE MARISA PORTOLESE

May 25, 2018 - February 10, 2019

This exhibition consists of 16 large-scale colour portraits of women taken with an analog view camera using natural light. It is the result of Portolese's research on the McCord Museum's Notman collection as a McCord's Artist in Residence.

For years, Portolese has been preoccupied with taking photos of women she knew personally, always from the perspective of their female-feminist power. Additionally, she embarked on studying the decors of traditional studio photography, such as in Notman's portraits. Like Notman, she also photographs children, mothers and older women, and uses backdrops and props to showcase her subjects within a confined space. In her compositions, the decor chosen for a specific portrait has a primary aesthetic function and a specific personality. 

Inspired by the sets created by Notman, Marisa Portolese chooses decors that evoke the Victorian era, yet her portraits, rich colours, and the vitality of the floral motifs, represent her personal choices. She roots her photographic portraiture in a pictorial tradition borrowed from art history.

The backdrops in Portolese's works, especially the floral arrangements, are spectacular. They are taken from paintings of old Dutch masters. She found the photos of these paintings in the public domain on the internet, cropped out images and floral arrangements she liked, enlarged and printed them, than hanged them in her studio behind a sitter. Though the resulting photos are spectacular, and the photographs of old master can be freely found on the internet, a question still remains of legitimacy of using bits and pieces from other people's creations for one's own works. It is well known that photographers themselves do not like when their photos are cropped or edited, or even worse, when some elements are appropriated out of them, and out of the original context, and then implanted by others into their personal works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication, Marisa Portolese – In the Studio with Notman / Dans le studio avec Notman, published by the McCord Museum with the financial assistance of Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. This book explains the artist’s approach, what inspired her portraits and the decors chosen specifically for each model, and points to similarities between women from different eras.

It is a pity the source of backdrop imagery in each photo is not acknowledged in Portolese's exhibited works at the McCord Museum and, with an exception of very few, in her book. By cropping those images from photos of old paintings, most likely enhancing them to her purposes on a computer, then enlarging them, still does not make them to be her own creations, regardless of an erroneous understanding a viewer of her portraits might get. 

Marisa Portolese at her McCord Museum Exibition

About Marisa Portolese

Born in 1969, Marisa Portolese is a Montreal artist of Italian descent. A graduate of Concordia University's MFA program in 2001, she is now an Associate Professor of Photography in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Her practice includes photography, video and curatorial work.

Portraiture, representations of women, narrative, autobiography and the figure in nature are major and recurrent subjects in her work. She often produces large-scale colour photographs rich in painterly references, which focus on facets of human experience in psychological and physical environments, creating immersive landscapes for the viewers.

Since 2002, Portolese has produced a number of photographic projects for exhibitions or publication: Belle de Jour I, II, III (2002-2016), Un chevreuil à la fenêtre de ma chambre (2003), The Recognitions (2004-2005), The Dandy Collection (2008), Imagined Paradise (2010), and Antonia's Garden (2011). She is the recipient of several awards along with numerous grants from the Canada and Québec Arts Councils, and the Du Maurier Arts Foundation.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos in this article by Nadia Slejskova.

For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.