Diana Markosian, Inventing My Father

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.

UNTITLED BY DIANA MARKOSIAN

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.

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