"Gerwyn Davies treats the photographic portrait as a stage for disappearance in his ongoing body of work. The Sydney-based artist engineers elaborately costumed selves that gleam under studio lighting, swell into sculptural proportions, and refuse to reveal a face. What appears at first to be hypervisibility, sequins, vinyl, and candy-colored textiles, becomes a visual barricade. The body inside the costume is present, centered, and performing."
"The approach of the photographer and costume maker has been embedded in his practice since before formal training. Davies first picked up a camera in a share house, staging improvised Friday-night fashion shoots with friends, using bedside lamps as lighting, and swapping roles between model, director, and photographer. The images were 'Vogue magazine on a B horror film budget,' he recalls, but they revealed the transformative potential of photography, its capacity to fabricate fantasy from ordinary domestic space."
Gerwyn Davies stages photographic portraits using elaborate, face-concealing costumes that both magnify and obscure the body. Studio lighting and glossy postproduction render the images synthetic, shallow, and implausible, pushing depth to recede. Costumes assembled from sequins, vinyl and candy-colored textiles swell into sculptural forms that act as visual barricades while centering an active, performing body within. Early share-house shoots informed a practice of role swapping and improvised fashion-making. Davies works blind inside constructed forms, shoots continuous frames, then selects and retouches the precise image where a character coheres, asserting control over visibility and identity.
Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine
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