studio@emiliotamezphoto.com
Emilio Tamez (b. 1999) is an American artist whose practice actuates images as functional technologies that investigate life’s rituals and our devotion to them. Attention and devotion are synonymous for Tamez who seamlessly dances between fine art and fashion commissions. She believes that fashion imagery is among the strongest living expressions of devotional imagery in our contemporary landscape — after the decline of religious art in the West. Utilizing the canon of fashion imagery as an operative language rather than an ultimate product, she weaves esoterica, performance, and semiology with reconstructions of non-linear memory to form her own distinct and evolving mythology. Her unique process, both technically rigorous and highly personal, is envivified through divination and radical views on technology which combine to create what she refers to in the image as nets. Evolving past the photograph as document, which is defined by the “frame”, Tamez defines a new theoretical approach to imagery which is characterized by nets. Borrowing its etymological root from the geometric unfolding of third dimensional objects into flattened forms, she proposes the image as the isolation and unfolding of a single point of entry for multidimensional egregores (spirits) into a flattened and readable field of information. Spirits and the nonphysical are therefore her primary subjects, while she guides actors (herself included) through posture and circumstance to host the dream within the 3D. Rituals, prayers, and memories are thus made material as a form of complex glyph. This distinction between photograph and image is a reoccurring theme in her research and work, and for Tamez, it becomes a paint of its own. Emilio Tamez evades simple indexing, even by her camera-based practice, as she challenges what an image does and how it warps reality each time that it is observed.
Emilio Tamez lives and works in New York City.
