On the Photography of Gina De Naia

Working in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, Bruce Nauman galvanized the international art world of that transitional moment with a visually arresting body of sculpture, objects, videotaped studio activities, and photography, leaping to the front of the class, from a New York perspective, out of nowhere. The impact of Nauman's Eleven Color Photographs upon art (less so staid “photography”) is enormous, and in so-called conceptual and behaviorist/phenomenological body art of the early 1970s, the still or moving image functioned as a performative “real-time” space essential to framing the humorous (William Wegman's videos, burlesquing Nauman) and the provocative (Hannah Wilke's glam-feminism).

Gina DeNaia's recent photography, videos, drawings, and painted works derive both from Nauman and a generational enchantment with handheld imaging technologies that evolved photography into a habitual act. Central to DeNaia's developing art is a form of self-portraiture reliant not on appropriative characterization(s) but the execution and clinical documentation of tasks, some of which appear mildly transgressive in a juvenile manner. In a series of truncated portraits, DeNaia does not apply makeup but “paints” her lips with her thumbs using red acrylic, resulting in a beguiling, if not bloody, “mess.” She also “plays” with, and therefore “wastes” matches, a huge childhood no-no. Again using her fingers as digits, she counts, making prelinguistic numerical gestures that are recorded via a hybrid of the photographic print and hand-rendered picture. Her works on paper and occasional readings involve the repetition of phrases (I USED TO THINK THAT IF I LOOKED AT A FORM IT WAS ABSOLUTE) that may recall enforced learnings or time-killing punishments doled out to unfortunate elementary school students in the past.

DeNaia's developing art occupies a cool center in a maelstrom of Instagram overkill and feverish selfies, a ubiquitous social phenomena whose effects on our recollective proces