Nigel Grimmer’s quirky and humorous ‘Art Drag Album’ series gained a fantastic response when we showed it in New York in September. Angie talks about the underlying themes behind the images below.
There’s always been something theatrical about
Nigel Grimmer’s work. Portrayed through the medium of photography, his exploration of ideas - which deal with many subjects including identity and social and cultural issues - is told as a narrative, with each piece precisely staged down to the last detail for maximum effect. The result is a series of captivating bodies of work that span the past 15 years.
His most recent series, ‘Art Drag Album’ which began in 2012 with
Art Drag Album (Nigel as Tina), sees Nigel himself featured in each piece, dressed up in a relevant costume with his face covered by a different picture that masks his identity and gives him an alternative persona. The pictures he uses are framed reproductions of retro paintings by artists such as J.H Lynch and Vladimir Tretchikoff that were mass produced in the 1970s and popular in people’s homes. Well constructed, the chosen backgrounds and Nigel’s wardrobe have been carefully selected to fit in with the attire of each lady to give the impression (although some more precisely than others) that what exists outside of the painting is a continuation of the painting itself, often with a humorous twist. For example, I love the way the sports socks in
Art Drag Album (Nigel as The Balinese Girl) have been chosen to match the colour of the girl’s satin headdress.
Despite their playful nature, Nigel’s ideas behind the works run much deeper as he begins to analyze the key principles of photography as a medium. Talking about the series, he says:
“I have begun disrupting the integrity of the picture plane in order to highlight the flatness, and thus the artificiality, of the photographic object. I wish to create my disruptions photographically, as part of the image-taking process.”
By experimenting with a secondary picture frame, Nigel is creating ‘windows’ within the main image, causing a slippage between the illusionary foreground and background of the photograph. He’s also interested in the different subjects approached in photography by photographers throughout history, and from his knowledge gained over the years, feels that much of the history of photography is based on a male quest for an ‘exotic other’, and thought that these portraits of strangely hued women from foreign lands played nicely with the idea of this ‘otherness’ or the search for something more.
Despite each image noticeably being part of the same body of work, Nigel treats every portrait as a separate project, paying meticulous attention to every detail. He says he has enjoyed turning the
“exotic beauties into something jarringly common or familiar; now they are walking the street in sportswear or pyjamas.”
As a child, Nigel would often appoint his brother to help him dress up and make photographs, which were usually taken with a cheap camera with amateur lighting. To a certain extent he wanted to keep this sense in the work he’s made as an adult, adding to the feeling of nostalgia in the Art Drag series that’s provided by the retro mass-produced paintings.
A strong and recognised body of work, in 2012
Art Drag Album (Nigel as Tina) was selected for the Foto 8 Summer Show, where one of the judges - award-winning British photographer Simon Roberts - chose it as one of his favourite pieces in the competition. The photograph went on to win first prize in the People’s Choice Award, selected by a public vote.
Each of the Art Drag pieces is available in an edition of just 15 for £720 incl.VAT / $1,015 USD. See the ongoing series so far on his artist’s page
here.