Andrea Pickens, Adriane Little, Anita Allyn and Lauren Simonutti’s work
emanates from personal tragedies. Pickens’ father was brutally murdered
when she was a child. Following the murder, the artist frequently dreamed
of flying. This reoccurring dream and devastating experience permeates her
work. Snapshot Series features digitally altered family
photographs, in which Pickens inserts herself ‘flying.’ Eerily
hovering above the heads of oblivious, smiling family members, only her
legs are visible. Ironically, the figure appears not to be flying or
floating, but as if she had hung herself with a noose. The images
represent the simultaneous act of fleeing and remaining rooted in personal
history and memories.
Adriane Little’s digital photographs derive from her mother’s
death when she was seven. Marking the barren landscape of upstate
In 1986, Anita Allyn’s best friend in art school was killed--the
resulting investigation unable to determine whether it was accidental or
intentional. For Allyn, the event activated an ongoing epistemological
debate on the subjects of accidents, circumstance and predestination. The
video Melancholy Object recreates the mise-en-scene of
death, serving as homage to friendship.
A serious accident in the mid 1990’s left indelible scars, which Lauren
Simonutti channels into her artistic practice. Her photographic
installation and book entitled, Drowning, Not Waving presents
case studies of suicide victims and the objects/artifacts left behind. In
the absence of a note, these objects create a narrative, speaking for the
deceased. Each composition contains a snapshot of the victim, the
victim’s signature, a concise report of the mode of death and
photographic documentation of the contents of the victim’s pockets, what
was found clutched in their hands or arranged to be the last thing the
deceased would see on this earth. The larger scale of the object image vs.
the portrait image suggests that the objects carry more meaning or history
than the snapshots. The series challenges established notions of truth and
the construction of history.
Both John Mann’s and Brian Moss’ work also address
issues of truth and absence in photography. Incorporating letters
documenting deaths of his ancestors, John Mann’s platinum print series, Silent Elegy examines traces of lives lost to memory. Rather
than giving information regarding the lives of the loved ones, the notes
comprised only the names and dates and detailed causes of death. Mann’s
recollections become inextricably linked with the manner of death. In the
absence of photographs, Mann constructs and documents a cairn of
branches/logs serving as a memorial to those lost souls.
In
the series entitled, Absence, Brian Moss explores death on
both a figurative and literal level. Scanning historically significant
documentary war photographs and digitally removing the dead or dying
bodies expunges the literal representation of death from the image. The
work also alludes to the metaphoric death inherent in photography; death
of a moment as frozen by the camera, death of the image as it is altered,
death of the author and originality, further compounded by digital
technology. Through the absence, the viewer contemplates the context and
supposed neutrality or objectivity of documentary photography and its
relationship to history.
Nadia Hironaka and Delmira Valladares use the cinematic
language of horror and suspense films to explore urban myths of murder in
their respective cities. Intrigued by rumors of murder in a house in her
Based on a trio of fantastic, but true stories occurring in
Sourcing images from visual culture including film, news and the media,
artists Karina Skvirsky, Patrick Craig Manning, Robert
Hirsch and Matt Weed examine the manifestations of violent
imagery, its distribution and ultimately its consumption by the mass
public. In Skvirsky’s Blowback, appropriated b-roll news
images of victims of war and natural disasters promenade through
Patrick Craig Manning’s Danse Macabre consists of 21
endlessly looping videos, composed from secondary characters extracted
from major motion pictures. The figures re-enact the motions they made in
the two seconds before their so-called deaths. Stuck in their ceaseless
motion of purgatory, the deaths melt from our memories as soon as the next
scene commences.
Using the process of recycling as way to re-examine history, Robert
Hirsch’s World in a Jar: War & Trauma reflects upon
visual cultural memories involving death, evil, tragedy, and trauma over
the past 400 years. Through the course of selection,
re-photographing, editing, and distilling, Hirsh presents the images in
glass jars, specimens of our violent history. The large-scale installation
in its form presented at CPW, consists of 96 stacked glass jars speaks to our obsession with violence
and death.
The video, The Killing Fields by Matt Weed implicates
the viewer as a consumer of violent images. Using video clips from
International news and terrorist organizations found on the Internet, Weed
manipulates the images, distilling them down to nearly abstract, sometimes
beautiful images. His work questions how visual definitions of violence
are constructed and how the media uses the divisive cues to elicit shock,
pleasure and/or sympathy. As image consumers, do we play the role of
perpetrator, victim or something else?
Corinne May Botz’, Lucinda Devlin’s, and Celia A. Shapiro’s work considers the process of criminal investigation and
subsequent ‘justice’ in our legal system. In The Nutshell
Studies of Unexplained Death, Corinne May Botz photographs a
collection of eighteen crime scene models that were built in the 1940's
and 50's by a progressive criminologist Frances Glessner Lee (1878 –
1962). The crime scene models, which were based on actual homicides,
suicides, and accidental deaths, were created to train detectives to
assess visual evidence. Framing the haunting details of the murder scene
dollhouses, Botz’ noir fiction images explore the dark side of domestic
life.
Surveying the psychologically complex domain of interior spaces, Lucinda
Devlin’s photographic series, The Omega Suites documents
the execution chambers in the
Celia A. Shapiro’s photographs entitled, The Last
Supper meditate on the violent paradox of justice and retribution.
Recreating the requested last meals of executed prisoners, the work
reflects on the symbol of the meal as life-giving and the subsequent
execution as life-taking. The body politic is giving sustenance to the
body condemned.
Employing the syntax of scientific observation, John Pinderhughes’,
Nate Larson’s, and Talia Greene’s work
investigates the relationship between the natural world, science and the
human body. John Pinderhughes’ black and white photographic series Burnt
Offerings, involves the saving of social detritus, the study of
borrowed time, the stripping down of a physical object to bear its soul
and the graphic interplay of light and line with emotional scrutiny.
Outwardly, each image is a diary, a borrowed moment, a suspended fragment,
a holding close of time and social involvement. Each object,
stripped to its essence, invokes the chorus of human relationships.
Nate Larson’s photographs reveal what is unseen to the human eye.
Invented in
1939 by Seymon Kirlian, Kirlian photography is a process that passes
electricity through an object to produce an image on photographic film or
paper, without the use of light. The photosensitized material records
multicolored electrical emanations from the object, which some refer to as
auras or biofields. Some experimenters believe that the photographs give
physical form to psychic energy. Others believe that it reveals the
etheric body, one of the layers of the aura thought to permeate all
animate objects.
Examining the tenuous relationship between observation, preservation and
the human desire to control nature, Talia Greene’s digital prints
question the ways in which we interact with nature, our attempts to study
and ultimately destroy it. In the series Observation/Preservation,
the artist highlights vulnerability, and the implicit violence inherent in
the urge to observe and control. The prints portray an unsettling
juxtaposition of bugs before and after their dismemberment, asking the
viewer to empathize with the insect, as well as with the urge to
scrutinize it.
Together the works on view evoke a vivid glance into human existence and
the symbiotic relationship between the corporeal body and its place in
nature and culture.
Colette
Copeland
is a multi-media artist who teaches visual studies, art writing and
photography at University
of
Nadia Hironaka
Matt Weed
To return to exhibitions, click here