Mimesis
Galeria Marilia Razuk
São Paulo, Brazil
Produced while in residence at Woodstock Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY in 2007, Dawit L. Petros’ Mimesis (The Woodstock Series) (2007) employs the formal device of the figure in the landscape enacting a preconceived gesture as a meditation on the relationship between subject and location. The paring of images do not merely represent a before and after moment, but reconfigure the relation between the two. The depicted artist’s body anticipates the absent gesture that follows. Each site confers possibility, and both are reshaped through the application of memory. These works utilize shifts and transitions to assess implications and possibilities of becoming and behaving like something else. The process of subsuming one’s self into an environment through the faculty of imitation raises questions of affinity and reciprocity between self and context.
