At a gallery opening last Saturday in Long Island City, visitors were treated to an unusual experience: after walking past a set of arresting portraits of an old man and woman, either glimpsed in the midst of seemingly everyday activities or looking directly at the camera, the viewer was confronted with the old man and woman themselves — in three dimensions — hanging out in the back of the gallery next to a wall of pictures of, well, themselves.
This somewhat surreal moment wasn’t the product of any high-art hijinks, though. Rather, Justine Reyes, the photographer behind the show, called “Home, Away from Home” and showing at the Homefront Gallery, plucked her subjects from real life, and more specifically, her own home.
The old man and woman featured in the photographs are Al Bertolino and Vincenza Reyes, Justine Reyes’ uncle and mother. The Jackson Heights native has been taking pictures of them for the last seven years, and the pair couldn’t be more pleased.
“We love the photos,” said Vincenza Reyes.
“They’re like my collaborators,” Justine Reyes added.
Among the 17 photographs in the exhibit are images the photographer shot in Australia, Spain, on a Bermuda cruise, at the Jersey shore and at her mother’s and uncle’s Jackson Heights home, where she also lived for a time immediately after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Master of Fine Arts degree.
In the images themselves, however, there’s no hint of the exotic locales where they were taken. The settings are all indoors: bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and living rooms. It’s hard to tell the hotel rooms apart, though not all that difficult to pinpoint the photos actually shot in a real home, which it seems, is part of the point.
All the portraits feel staged, as Bertolino and Vincenza Reyes never look fully at ease — whether it’s a shot of Reyes in the bathroom with a black eye and scuffed knee (the result of a fall, Justine Reyes explained), or an image of the pair sitting next to each other on a bed.
While Bertolino and Reyes’ gazes are never “confrontational,” gallery owner and Flushing native Crystal Kui said, there’s still something not a little disturbing in the images, and also, familiar. The result is haunting, and as Kui succinctly noted, a combination of both “the ordinary and the out of the ordinary.”
This quality is emphasized by a certain formal rigor to the images — most are bathed in a calm, blue lighting, with careful framing and clean focus. They all have the feel of still lifes, with a slew of details — the objects on a kitchen table, the contents of a medicine bag — meticulously rendered.
Initially, Justine Reyes found the portraits she was taking were so personal that they were “extremely hard to share.” She began the series after the move back into her family home, when another uncle, Vinnie, died. The artist said the tragedy led her to think about her mother and surviving uncle’s fragility.
There’s “a sadness in these pictures,” she said, that’s about grappling with “mortality and what that means.”
‘Home, Away from Home’
When: Through Jan. 8, 2012, Thurs. to Sat., noon to 6 p.m. and by appointment
Where: The Homefront Gallery, 26-23 Jackson Ave., Long Island City
Info: (347) 827-0553
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