September 16, 2007, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY – Subjects of Power and Devotion, curated by Fabian Goncalves Borrega, opens at NURTUREart Gallery at 910 Grand Street in Williamsburg on October 12th with a reception from 6-9 p.m.

Fetishism takes us into the realm where fantasy intervenes in representation… the substitution of an object for some dangerous, powerful but forbidden force. —Stuart Hall

Objects have a mysterious ability to attract our attention, our desire, and our intrigue. This ability can simply (or not so simply) derive from the aesthetics of the object, or through the object functioning as placeholder for emotional or otherwise significant human experiences. This process is one of synthesis and condensation of elements that creates fetishes charged with religious or other forms of devotion and attraction. In the photographs collected for Subjects of Power and Devotion, the objects under the artist’s gaze are diverse, from human bodies to fragmentary landscapes, but all explore the way we honor, fetishize, and encode desire, memory and power into material substance, including our own bodies.

Featured Artists in the exhibition are Katia Fuentes, Luis Delgado, Amy Tamayo, Mary Daniel Hobson, and Leah Oates.

Katia Fuentes uses her own body as a canvas for the representation of Mexican Saints, transforming herself into an object of veneration while simultaneously documenting a much more personal subjective experience.

In his series Enigma, San Francisco based artist Luis Delgado employs a very different procedure. Adopting a cooler, less personal eye, Delgado rearranges the human figure with different “culturally” charged segments, creating a recontextualized human body that solicits a complex reading.

Recontextualization is also the strategy of Puerto Rican artist Amy Tamayo. Her images of fetishized objects and body/objects are displaced from their natural function or location in rich and evocative photographs. Tamayo deliberately uses images that come directly from personal experiences of passion, love and suffering.

Mary Daniel Hobson, by contrast, takes pictures of people’s arms, telling the model to wish for something during the process, and the wish of the model is included it the picture. This gentle procedure is based on milagros, the Latin American tradition of offering human body parts made out of tin or silver to a saint for a cure, miracle, or special favor.

As a colophon, the artistic works of Leah Oates also allude to the same fragmentation of memory in her series Paradura. In these photographs she creates fictional landscapes that cannot be viewed as “real” but instead are seen as recollections of past events, thoroughly influenced by complex personal emotions.