Diana Markosian's father would fit well
in an Everclear song. During her childhood, he would vanish without
explanation for months at a time, then return as if nothing had
happened. His stormy relationship with her mother ended when her mother
fled to the United States from Moscow, taking the then-7-year-old
Markosian and her brother to California. They never told her father
goodbye and didn't see him again for 15 years. Her mother painstakingly
cut his image out of every picture in which he appeared in the family
photo album—a detail that adds poignancy to Markosian's new photo
series, Inventing My Father.
In
2013, Markosian flew to Armenia to reunite with her father, an event she
documented in black-and-white portraits and still lifes. Because he had
been a cipher to her during all the intervening years, the experience
of visiting him was not so much "getting to know you" as it was
inventing him from scratch: inferring the contours and features of a
phantom. From these untitled photographs, you can sense how surreal the
experience must have been for Markosian. In one image, the man gazes at
the camera through two windows, the glass panes blurry with reflections
and glare. Knowing the backstory, it's impossible not to see these
distortions as metaphors for the time and distance that have warped the
man's image in his daughter's mind. Another photo shows one of the man's
shirts on a hanger in the dying light of early evening—an empty garment
filled only with shadows. In another dramatically lit shot, the man
sits on his sofa, his white hair aglow in sunlight, his face and torso
completely obscured by shadow.
To
the artist's credit, she allows these multiple layers of meaning to play
out gently. She doesn't hit you over the head with treacly symbolism;
she doesn't need to. As a subject, her father doesn't give much. If he
has a personality, he's keeping it very close to his vest. You get the
sense that Markosian still harbors a good deal of anger toward him but
is doing her damnedest to understand and forgive—hoping that just maybe,
all these photographs might begin to fill up the hole his absence left
inside her.
SEE IT: Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Through Feb. 1.
Willamette Week