We speak so much about what breaks our hearts, but never about what makes them. What bolsters our sense of self? What roots us to the earth? What gives us a sense of place and a sense of our place in this wide, wide world? There are innumerable answers to these questions, yet we still ask them. The right answer for us shifts daily, really with each moment. What grounded us yesterday can upend us tomorrow.
But one thing is constant - the insistence of existence. Each day, consciously or not, we insist on continuing on. Sometimes we just survive, sometimes we thrive. Through APPARATUS we bring whatever bounty we find within ourselves out into the world. Yes, we design objects - tools for living. But if we are a machine, our energy source is the people who inspire us.
So how do we honor them? By speaking their names, acknowledging their impact, and celebrating their agency as creative beings. Sure, you can leave one of our galleries with a beautiful object that serves a beautifully simple function. But you can also leave with empty hands and a full head or heart. Often, it is that which we cannot hold in our hands which matters most.
APPARATUS started with light. But we are as concerned with what light illuminates as we are with its source. When we say a person is “full of light” the phrase suggests a hard-won inner peace or wisdom. It’s not always visible, and certainly not visible to all, but we can change that too. With these photographs we endeavored to highlight the inner light of our champions and comrades.
A photograph is meant to capture a brief moment in time, someone’s essence - a small fraction of what drives them, what keeps them alive. And sometimes a photograph can capture that most precious thing - the energy that links one being to another. And so, in these images you feel not just the subject, but the network of people who helped that subject shine. They are out of the frame but ever present.
When we shot this portfolio, the experience we created for our collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera, was just as important as the final image. We believe you can feel each figure's vivacity - what they bring into the world.
Joel Chen’s decades of rigorous research is communicated immediately - like the deep, warm glow of a glowing coal - in his portrait. Through movement, Jacob Larsen shows the breadth of possibility in nonverbal communication and bodily expression. Dianne Brill, resplendent and glamorous with hair to the ceiling, emits the powerfully magnetic energy of a nightlife doyenne. Her extreme rarity, as she leads with inclusivity rather than exclusivity, apparent in the figures around her, buoying her big heart. Debra Shaw, the glowing goddess of fashion, can embody the fullness of a narrative as yet untold through the flick of a wrist or the tilt of her head. Behind her eyes you see the unyielding and singular beauty of her soul. Justin Vivian Bond, slick and combustible, explodes open binaries both seen and unseen. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with open arms, focuses the force of a tornado through the smallest of digits. These people define and redefine art forms that have existed for centuries.
Gabriel Hendifar, our Artistic Director, often describes the mission of APPARATUS as creating an “envelope” for human experience and interaction. The Cylinder System is the most minimal iteration of this. The envelope is one single beam. The letters are these characters that enrich our exterior and inner lives. With these photographs we privilege the meaning of a creative life well lived over the tools used to live it.
In recent years visibility has come to serve as a stand in for many other things - reparations, retribution, revelation. We know, of course, that visibility does not mean moral equanimity. Visibility is just visibility.
But if we look at the word in honesty, for what it can mean alone, without our wishes and hopes projected onto it, we see that it can offer us so much without projection. Seeing is believing as they say. When we see someone all we know for sure is that they exist. We might see their agency in their visual choices. We might see their restrictions, self-imposed or otherwise, if we look even closer. We might see their preferences.
With these images we hope you see a little bit more - the curiosity and self-actualization that makes life worth living. We offer these photographs as biographies in light.
