During the last two years, Claudia Ammirata worked on a project that artmedia GALLERY has included in its 2019 exhibition program. The gallery welcomes proudly Fix Me. Photography & Video by Claudia Ammirata for being an exhibit in which the artist’s documentary approach relates deeply to her exploration in art language as a depository of imaginative, sensitive, and touching making-resources.

Critical life events of one of her sons, including psychiatric hospitalization, are at the core of Ammirata’s photographic series and video. As a body of photographs, Fix Me can be affiliated to new trends in documentary photography, aimed to disregard the traditional ways to work with the referents of reality, because of its love for details, allusive more than direct representations, and elliptical narrative. Without a doubt, the photographer has preferred to assume a discreet presence in the story, regardless of her involvement in her intimate, private account as a main character.

The reading proposed by the homonymous video runs parallel to the photographic series, but the animated images introduce a distinctive feature: the voice of and comments made by the young protagonist of the story. It is not casual than the video was the last piece created and incorporated to Fix Me, because it completes the quality of this body of work as a container of experiences that implicate two persons in different types of interactions.

In Fix Me, Ammirata has avoided both sentimentalism and victimization constructing a poignant and simultaneously hoping discourse that claims for understanding and empathy. She demonstrates how art documentary practices in photography and video are still able to create images that transmute heartbreaking individual and collective stories into conscious public affairs.

About the artist

Claudia Ammirata (Venezuelan, based in Miami) started photographing at a young age while living in Paris, France. She pursued her interest in photography by taking courses at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited at art galleries and fairs, including among them: Scope Miami, 2014: the Hot Spot Show, at Curator’s Voice Art Project, 2015; Miami Twist, 2016; Art Palm Beach and Context Art Miami, 2018, and Art New York, 2019. She is the author of the book “Ephemeral Beauty,” edited in 2017.

About the curator

Cuban-born, José Antonio Navarrete resided in Venezuela for two decades. He currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. He is a critic, researcher, and independent curator of art and visual culture, with an extensive written production, who recently began to practice art photography and video. His last published book was Escribiendo sobre fotografía en América Latina. Antología de textos 1925-1970, edited by Centro de Fotografía, Montevideo, in 2018.

About the gallery

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to exhibit and promote contemporary art. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.