About

Emilio Tamez (b. 1999) is an American artist and conceptual photographer who actuates images as functional technologies that participate in life’s rituals and reveal our devotion to them. Attention and devotion are synonymous for Tamez, who investigates an expanding field of image grammars and their operative potentials, approaching them less as aesthetic conventions than through how they allow an image to behave. Fashion imagery, having inherited many of the devotional functions once held by religious art, is one such grammar. This methodological touchpoint in her research is best described as appropriating fashion’s logic of image construction, through body language, performance, repetition, and assumption, as one of many operative languages in her glyph-making, rather than as a commercial product.

Evolving past the photograph as document, which is defined by the “frame,” Tamez defines a new theoretical approach to imagery characterized by what she calls nets. Borrowing the term from the geometric unfolding of three-dimensional objects into flattened forms, she proposes the image as the isolation and unfolding of a single point of entry through which multidimensional egregores (spirits) enter 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 artificed into an arcane complex glyph. This distinction between photograph and image is a recurring theme in her research and work, and for Tamez, it becomes a kind of paint in its own right.

Tamez evades simple indexing, even within her camera based practice, as she provokes the question of what an image does and how it warps reality each time it is observed. Her practice aims first at what photography finds most uncomfortable: the invisible. Her resulting parapaintings are a laboratory where shifts in subject matter gradually construct a memetic library across the work. At a moment when photography’s evidentiary function and its primary properties of mediation are increasingly destabilized, these questions take on particular urgency. Truth is no longer guaranteed by the camera’s shutter alone. As she sees it, reportage, by its technical nature, is backward facing in a post historical world; she fixes her sight instead on what an image might yet seed the world to become.