Cacher

“As I try to mask the excess of my sentiment, I’ve come to acknowledge the common ground between desire and denial, pleasure and pain that lies in all human relationships. ”Taken between 2015 and 2017, Thy Tran’s photographs document the intricacies of her relationship with her former girlfriend. Combining the private space and the transient moments of their time together, the tension between connection and disconnection serve as a vantage point, revealing her private world to public eyes in a blended portrait of both the artist and her partner. Obscuring the faces of both herself and her lover, Tran’s images explore the more intimate and obscure details of a relationship, from mundane visits to a supermarket, to the pile of clothes casually thrown on the chair from the night before. CACHER (from the French for ‘to hide’) derives from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, and serves, as Tran says, as an “act of opening up myself to vulnerability that the photographs release”. Tran’s work serves to remove its subjects at the same time as paradoxically making them explicit; in CACHER, her practice reconfigures the intimate in a language that is uninhibited.