Finalist - 2012 Print Award - Fremantle Arts Centre - WOMEN OF JERUSALEM

WOMEN OF JERUSALEM @ christophe canato

This photographic series coincides with Christophe Canato’s early 2011 work in progress. It has been finalised for the yearly collective exhibition The Station Of  The Cross achieved by Curator Catherine Czerw in 2012, Perth Western Australia.

In his first research, Canato’s work in progress was about the women of his life. He was raised in a matriarcal family environment with a dominant Italian grandmother, a severe feminist mother and politically engaged, a loving but independant big sister eleven years older and a close and protective aunt in a fusional relationship. These powerful women were the fairies who bent over his cradle bequeathing power and fears, responsible for his orientations, engagements and regrets.

Motivated by this context, Canato realized a photographic series of intimate segnor white hair women dressed in white camisole. These bright evanescent photographs wobble between serenity versus opressiveness, purity versus degeneration, death versus angelic, beauty versus repulsion.

With his desire to represent the station number eight from the Station of the Cross, Canato finds the perfect match with this previous work and a resonance in the religious text.

“…

For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us’. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” *

Women of Jerusalem is an allegience of Canato’s women of life and more largely, a dedication of all women with their tolls in religion, their cultural tributes and their social responsibilities.

* Extract from the station of The Cross. Station number eight, Women of Jerusalem.