robert rainey

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the non-self portraiture of robert rainey by lizzie zukker saltz Like artists Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, newcomer Robert Rainey made the leap from the corporate world into that of contemporary art. His crossover outlook has produced a remarkable and timely series of conceptual photographic portrait projects. After working as a graphic designer, art director, and entertainment marketer for nearly 17 years five as Miramax's V.P. of Creative Advertising during the company's ground-breaking formative years' — a life-threatening heart arrhythmia forced Rainey to return to the South for a risky surgery, reconsider his priorities, "get off the wheel... edit life tighter." Rainey chose to return to his first love, photography, taking classes and eventually pursuing a M.F.A. at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which, amusingly, he saw as a relaxingly self-indulgent pursuit after the "self-imposed drama" and "constant pressure of money." The idea that I might have a life as an artist was a revelation... What I soon realized was that in spite of all of my professional experience, I actually had something to say which was a product of myself. Everything prior been a team effort of sorts. In light of this, it is telling that Rainey's ease with collaborative and market-driven production resulted in work unusual for its submerged self-expressivity and concern with audience reception. His artworks origins are nonetheless deeply personal, especially the Family Self Portrait Series begun in 2004, in which Rainey addresses, albeit obliquely, his homosexuality. In so doing, he engages with a tradition of performative photography linked to late-1980s identity politics. Yet Rainey's work reads as a cool 21st century antidote to the highly expressive, revealing, confessional, and sometimes purposely shocking self-transformations of gender-benders such as Loren Cameron, Deborah Kass, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Pierre et Gilles, and Lyle Ashton Harris, to name a few. It also coolly answers the numerous queer identity exhibitions that took place during the Stonewall 25 season. Not that Rainey was a stranger to the sturm und drang of the late 1980s. Born in 1963, he participated in the political theatrics of such vital AIDS activist organizations as ACT UP and Queer Nation in New York City at that "confusing time when all my New York mentors were dying, a typesetter one day, a photo retoucher. I recall one year when someone was dying all the time —it was unbearable." This sets the scene for his Family Self Portrait Series which on the surface seem utterly banal. What transforms them from mundane to complex is that in each image, I have replaced a family member with myself. I literally become an "actor" in someone else's environment. The idea here is to challenge conventional notions of what a family is and what "family" means. By inserting myself in a foreign context, I am subverting the conventional implications of "identity" for the typical family... [I]n view of the South's notoriously conservative attachment to social and moral norms, the pictures suggest a variety of controversial meanings.

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