The Sanchez Brothers - Exposures of the Dark
4. February 2009, 10:27:18 unter: Canada, English, Montreal, Podcasts, Portraits, VideoCarlos, born 1976, Jason, born 1981, surname Sanchez, together, “The Sanchez Brothers”, are an extremely promising, young photographer collective. The work of the two young artists from Canada has already been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, the USA, and Europe.
Their photography, produced in a Montreal studio located in a factory buildings owned by their uncle, has been successful, although, or perhaps because, they shed light on the dark sides of life and human actions: pain, insanity, death, natural selection, injustice, abuse, disaster, mourning, degradation, isolation, exploitation. One can find among these, that which one turns a blind eye to in life.
What Carlos and Jason Sanchez visualize are themes of events which one hears about based on media reports and stories. Their photographs condense the storylines. They are key scenes, frozen in time, into which one immediately gets immersed, allowing the viewer to experience the challenge of the photographers, who want to share a complex context in a single cinematic image.
Such capsulization is costly and would be not possible for the two young artists without national funding and support from the province of Quebec, which goes into research, scouting for the right locations, the visualization of the imagined scenes in the studio sets. Part of the interior design, purchased in furniture stores and second-hand shops, is carefully packed up again after the shoots and properly returned for reuse – this saves money, because the photographic work of the duo is already costly from a temporal perspective. On the average, two months go into the production of one image.
The brothers have observed development in the extension of their work towards installation, a path which they have already followed in the last few years with works such as “Between Life and Death”, “Natural Selection”, and “Buried Alive”. Film also holds a place in the long-range artistic future of Carlos and Jason Sanchez. (wh/jn)
Their next solo exhibition will be shown at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles in February.
