Small Death

Small Death collects photographs made by the artist Martha Naranjo Sandoval over her first years living in New York after emigrating from Mexico City. Shaped around Naranjo Sandoval’s original contact sheets and film reels, it comprises an artist’s book unfolding in tactile and iterative form. Sandoval’s work moves between streetscapes, nude self-portraits, compositions of found forms, and tender photographs of her family, all suffused with a sensitivity to the ways in which the artist’s surroundings, loved ones, and home continuously shape her sense of self and belonging. The artist’s husband, parents, and siblings are pictured in their homes as well as in more dislocating rural and urban landscapes between the US and Mexico, tracing a continuum between displacement and rootedness. Meanwhile close-up self-portraits, interspersed throughout, act as registers of the determined introspection that anchors this powerful exploration of the image sequence and book form as means of physical and sensual expression.

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