Barbara Stafford, Every Summer, 2023
water soluable oil on panel, 12” x 12” (13” x 13” framed)

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present Volver a ver / To see again, an exhibition of new work by Georgina Reskala.

Born and raised in Mexico and now living in Los Angeles, Reskala has had a fascination with the camera since a young age. Working with silver gelatin prints and photographs printed on linen and silk, Reskala’s photographs begin as a single, long exposure image. She then continues to alter the image, adding and redacting information from the image through material processes of physically manipulating the paper, unthreading the warp or weft of the linen, or by printing, rephotographing, and reprinting the same image multiple times.

The remnants of this process are evident in the finished images: crumpling, creasing, moving, bending and folding act as a way to distort and abstract. The resulting image takes on a shape and form of its own and begins to question the distortion of history.

Georgina Reskala’s work deals with ideas of memory, history, and the power of narrative. By manipulating moments she mimics storytelling, translation, and remembering in a visual format. Through the making of a photograph and the subsequent process of altering information on the surface of the work, she is able to explore different sides of a story and build a new visual language. The resulting image is not only a representation but a discourse, a combination of different perspectives, points of perception, and understandings. Reskala’s work is a process of seeing, making, taking apart, and putting back together in order to see again (volver a ver).

The exhibition encourages viewers to consider how a single story can contain a multitude of perspectives. Disrupting the way we look and remember resists easy and immediate interpretation—to look again, to look with someone else’s eyes so as not to be complacent, but to pay attention to the way we see in order to understand the cultural and political desire to label the unknown and erase our memories.

Reskala received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA, and her Master of Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. Among her accolades, she has been given the Director’s Award from the Center for Fine Art Photography, was JRNL 7 winner in Fotofilmic, and received Honorable Mention Awards from International Photography Awards, Santa Fe Workshops, and Photowork Place. In 2017, Reskala was shortlisted for the prestigious Hariban Award. In 2021, Reskala was an artist-in-residence at Iris Projects in Venice, CA.

She has exhibited at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, OR), The San Francisco Arts Commission (San Francisco, CA), Upstart Modern (Sausalito, CA), The Meyer Simpson Library (San Francisco, CA), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), MiM Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Contornos Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), Luxxe Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Edgewise Arts (San Francisco, CA), Marshall Contemporary (Venice, CA), Mitrani Gallery (Miami, FL), Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Tenth Street Gallery (San Francisco, CA), La Cueva (Mexico City), K.OSS CONTEMPORARY ART (Detroit, MI), Quotidian (San Francisco, CA), Slate Art (San Ramon Valley, CA), Harvey Milk Institute (San Francisco, CA), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland, OR), and Today Art Museum (Beijing, China), among others.

Reskala’s work is held in the public collections of the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), the Cassilhaus Collection (Chapel Hill, NC), and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR).

Tuesday - Saturday 10 am - 5 pm