photo essay: Magali Duzant

Ardara and On

The photographic series Ardara and On feeds into an American stereotype; the West as a place of possibility and new beginning coupled with a feeling of disillusionment in that idea; a feeling of loss, all placed within a storied and cinematic setting.

These images illustrate the ways in which a new place is seen and felt on ones’ own – viewed through the prism of combined personal experience and cinematic tropes. There is an underlying loneliness and a deep feel for the last light of the day. California is depicted as the proverbial film set that it so often manifests itself into. It carries an aspect of tension as well as one of fantasy; where fears and uncertainties lurk below the surface; the face of which plays into popular imagination – California as the pliable new.

 

MAGALI DUZANT is a photographer and illustrator based in San Francisco, CA. Born and raised in New York, she received a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Carnegie Mellon University. She formerly worked as the Exhibition Coordinator at Silver Eye Center for Photography and was the Director of Photography for the interdisciplinary firm PoiNT Projects. She has exhibited nationally and was named one of Philadelphia based Project Basho’s Onward  Emerging Photographers of 2010. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA where she is  working on a photographic book entitled, Ardara and On. She runs an illustration site and zine, Notes On A Coast, devoted to editorial observations on life in the Bay Area. Her photographs have appeared in Relay Arts Magazine, the sustainability journal Verdure, and the Parsons Paris look-book among other publications. She can be reached via email at magali@magaliduzant.com