Rachel Portesi’s preoccupation with hair is dense. The artist describes her own as “long, luxurious, beautiful hair. Every person who goes to cut my hair mentions it,” she says. “Someone even tried to buy it once in a Dunkin’ Donuts.”
Portesi is of Italian and Irish descent (she’s actually waiting on the results of an ancestry test when we speak), but identifies heavily with her Italian side. Her mother had very long hair too, and that’s where things get a bit raw. “She had basically abandoned me at age nine—I left her at age nine,” Portesi explains. “I didn’t see her again for a long time.”
All that female hair evokes—a tense tangle of sexuality, gender, self-identity, ownership, repression, and conformation—is the focus of Portesi’s latest series, “Hair Portraits,” which is on exhibition at Vermont’s Brattleboro Museum & Art Center starting this weekend. In her images, which have an antique appearance as they are tintypes, the artist molds and sculpts her sitters’ hair, defying gravity and any notion of how hair ought to look. Portesi fashions it into fantastical creations, lacing in natural elements like crinkled leaves, twigs, and tropical fronds. The result is a collection of photographs which beguile with intimacy and the unexpected.
Source: vogue.com
