May 9 — May 31, 2025
Joe Librandi-Cowan and Rosemary Haynes
Curated by Rainer Turim
Opening
Friday, May 9, 2025
7-10pm
Closing
Saturday, May 31, 2025
6-9pm
Living Skin is pleased to present Material Proxy, a two-person exhibition by Rosemary Haynes and Joe Librandi-Cowan, curated by Rainer Turim, opening on May 9th on view through May 31st.
I would not want to photograph the way Haynes and Librandi-Cowan do. The act requires accepting difficult memories that many, like myself, choose to let fade; instead, their feelings of familial uncertainty and worry are out on full display. Last year, Haynes photographed my family in my childhood apartment. She brought narratives for us to enact, but seeing the structure of our apartment, she began to create new scenes. In one photograph, she caught a look that my dad gave my mom that I’ve only ever recalled in my memory from living with them. I never met someone else curious about the private gestures of my family. Haynes’s photographs bring to the surface the memories that I would rather keep between my family and me. And in the same way, I was glad to see someone else see a kind of magic in my family and in this space where I grew up.
Haynes’s photographs create theater from reality, turning her memories into scene sets and constellations, preserving the uncertainty of some connections. She gives new life to the subtle artifacts of existence, while also acknowledging their silence as mementos of the past. In some photographs, she carefully assembles her deceased stepmother Heather’s belongings. In others, Haynes’s brother becomes a proxy for understanding his desire for more stories of a mother he never got to know. Haynes is not only documenting but also creating new portals to visualize and imagine Heather’s legacy. In her darkroom composites, the skeletal structure of the camera’s apparatus appears like the figure of her father. The components make up the framework of Haynes’s existence. Haynes’s composites are sketches of connections with silent threads. She creates riddles with no intention of solving them.
Librandi-Cowan’s photographs focus on his mother over the course of 10 years, before and during the years his childhood home was foreclosed and demolished. In his portraits and photographs of interiors and landscapes, we find double meanings-- reasons to worry and fear for collapse, but also reminders of solitude, comfort, and tranquility. In the photograph of an empty lot lined with trees, Librandi-Cowan remembers the home that once stood there. These sorts of memories are what Librandi-Cowan confronts; he cannot recall his home without also recalling its destruction. He finds refuge in rituals of care, despite the difficult contexts in which he and his mother find themselves. In one portrait, his mother’s closed eyes contest the idealistic familial portrait. She relinquishes our expectation for her to stare back at the viewer.
Haynes and Librandi-Cowan, who met in the Fall of 2022, provide two differing approaches to understanding their family relationships. While Haynes’s photographs involve varying people in different scenes and still lives, Librandi-Cowan follows mainly two kinds of imagery-- his mother and his childhood home. In Haynes’s photographs, there are murmurs and whispers of conversation; for Librandi-Cowan, dialogue occurs internally, as he reconciles the quiet landscape. Librandi-Cowan pulls back to photograph his fading home, while Haynes leans in to photograph her brother at the dinner table. Paired together, they offer macro and micro introspections of family and space. We move in and out of two necessary headspaces and mindsets-- concentration and contemplation. This exhibition confronts the shell of home, the artifacts of our families, and their mortality.
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Joe Librandi-Cowan (b. 1991, Auburn, NY) received his BFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University. His photographic practice, centered around notions of home and family, attempts to navigate life's difficult, but shared experiences. His work has been featured by the BBC, Vogue Italia, and Light Work.
Rosemary Haynes (b. 1998, Florence, MA) is an artist working in analog photography and darkroom methods to explore between the technical and the emotive. Formally trained as a Gelatin Silver printer, Haynes uses the camera to create staged portraits, environmental images and diaristic maps. Exploring a relationship between camera, subject and photographer, her work is both collaborative and reflexive on the photographic process.
Exhibition history includes Justine Kurland Studio, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Soft Serve Projects, and Arcanite Pictures. She was included in Cultured Magazine’s 2024 Young Photographer’s List, is a recipient of the 2025 Junior Photowork Fellowship, and is a co-founder of Rubylith Darkroom.
Rainer Turim (b. 1999, New York, NY) is an artist and writer living in New York City. His writing examines underground culture, graffiti, and art history within the East Village and New York City. His writing is in the collections of Bard College, the New York Public Library, the Seward Park Library, and the University of Arizona. He is the editor of Photo Things, a newsletter and podcast on New York City contemporary fine-art photography programming, exhibitions, and publishing.
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