Joana P. Cardozo: Blueprints

Joana P. Cardozo: Blueprints by Aline SmithsonJune 3, 2017

©Joana P. Cardozo, Self-Portrait

Joana P. Cardozo brought a project to Photolucida that was a creative and fresh look at portraiture. Her project, Blueprints, uses the details of every day life. Personal artifacts and objects are placed into architectural floor plans to reveal something about the inhabitant. The brightly colored backdrops set the stage for graphic still lifes that become small stories, filled with the minutia that makes a home. Her work is currently featured in the 8th Annual Self-Portrait Exhibition and The Encore Gallery at Taos Center for the Arts, Taos – NM, running through July 9th and was selected for the 2017 Soho Photo Gallery National Competition, running from July 5 – July 22, 2017 in New York.

Joana P. Cardozo is a Brazilian-born visual artist based in New York City. Her creative practice utilizes photography to produce images that engage her subjects and their home environments in a unique graphic style of portraiture titled Blueprints. Cardozo graduated from the International Center of Photography in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in group shows including Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn; International Center of Photography, New York; Photoville, Brooklyn; Filter Space, Chicago; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn and Paraty em Foco International Photography Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

©Joana P. Cardozo, Roy

Blueprints

A silent piano, high heels in the walking-in closet, faded dead flowers still releasing a sweet smell, toys fighting each other in the basement, incense, lace and Saints.

Blueprints gravitate towards the notion that our home is the reflection of ourselves. Instead of conventional photographic portraiture, I reveal the personalities of my subjects by depicting the contents of their homes.

©Joana P. Cardozo, Amy

Like a mirror, a home reflects the identity of their inhabitants. The way the content of a house is arranged reveals, in a whisper, whether the person is organized, chaotic, romantic, divorced; everything I imagine to know. I enter. I pick objects. I remove them from their places. I place them in front of a light source. I create a new object. I put the object back. The shadow is gone.

The final images resemble architectural floor plans; however, Blueprints are in fact an unusual form of portrait. While these portraits do not depict my subject’s faces, hands, or likenesses, they are a reflection of each person, a reverse projection, a negative of the original. It is like reading their biography, but from the outside in.