Andrea Tese

Andrea Tese is a New York City based photographer and artist with a solo exhibition of her
project “Inheritance” slated to open at De Buck Gallery in New York City in January 2014. Past
exhibitions include her debut solo show entitled “Boats Against the Current” at the Heist Gallery in New York City in 2009 as well as group exhibitions at (e)merge Art Fair in Washington DC, Photo Place Gallery in Vermont, the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, The Lyceum Theatre Gallery in San Diego, The Seven Seas Gallery in Massachusetts, ConnerSmith Gallery and the Georgetown University Art Gallery in Washington DC, and the Visual Arts Gallery in New York City. Tese’s work is part of the permanent collection at George Eastman House, The Center for Fine Art Photography, the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and is owned by the prestigious Sandor Family Collection in Chicago. After obtaining a BA from Georgetown University, she received her MFA from The School of Visual Arts in 2007. Today we take a look at her series titled
Inheritance.

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Inheritance

Clothing, bottles, appliances – relatable objects that serve as the basic accessories of daily life, schematically arranged to form a visual inventory of one man’s possessions. The Inheritance project is an exploration into ideas of legacy, identity, and impermanence, of what we leave behind and how that defines us. At the same time, it is a deeply personal documentation of the artist’s mourning process following the passing of her grandfather. By rearranging the objects that filled his home into pictorial compositions to assert her own presence as an artist, Tese authors a chronicle of a life as expressed by simple objects, ranging from those unique to the individual subject, such as a collection of paperweights or newspaper clippings including those about Tese herself as a child, to pedestrian items such as shoes or pots and pans. Despite the potential sentimentality of the project for the artist and her audience, Tese’s photographs are abstracted by her deadpan treatment of the subject matter, organizing the items into grids, piles and sometimes playful arrangements that allow the objects to be assessed individually as well as en masse by the audience.

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When viewed together, the images form a posthumous portrait of the deceased that allows the viewer to “know” Tese’s grandfather, just as her categorization and presentation of his belongings speak to the artist’s practice and style. These photographs function simultaneously as an acknowledgement to the ephemeral nature of life and as an indulgence in man’s unwillingness to give in to this understanding – his desire to arrest time, to counter anonymity, to leave something behind, to be immortal.

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To view more of Andrea’s work please visit her website.