Tanisha Wookey

“I carry this feeling close when wandering through Tanisha Wookey’s Knowing You (2023), a series of photographic prints positioned around a multi-wall installation space. At the entry point stands a closet, its opened doors and written statement inviting viewers to “uncover the link between the visual narratives and individuals.” Inside hang various garments, an amalgamation of aesthetics, with their pulls, frays, and alterations indicating histories of wear. The same applies to the closet itself—a transactional holding-place of memories—its scuffs and chipped-paint exterior hint that it has been relocated straight from a bedroom and into the show. Each portrait features a different individual as subject, centred in the composition, their eye contact locking on to the viewer’s gaze. Each individual’s garment in the photographs is brought by Wookey into the closet and physical gallery space. In reference to Nigel Shafran’s 1990s Teenage Mall Shoppers series, perhaps, Wookey’s photographs seem to sit in a category beyond that of the commercial fashion photograph, as both anthropological snapshots of youth and tender documentations of friendship and connection.”