JENNIFER GARZA-CUEN – https://www.garza-cuen.com/
Artist Interview by Juan Madrid
This is an open series of interviews with the artists in the Photography Now 2017 exhibition.
“Many of the town churches, local rooming houses, community centers, grange halls, and other public gathering places are now only frequented by a handful of senior citizens and a few dedicated families. While the younger generations play computer games and move to cites as soon as they possibly can, the remaining residents are trying desperately and often failing to maintain a more rural and self-sufficient lifestyle and to keep the doors to these local gathering places open. “
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1. Where are you from, and what is your background in photography? How did you get into photography?
I was born in Seattle, WA, and began making photographs as a teenager. For years while traveling through Central and South America, Europe and North Africa the camera was my only consistent companion. I did my undergraduate studies in Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo, then moved to London where I worked for fashion and advertising photographers as a photo assistant, publishing my own work in travel magazines. After moving back to the States, I completed my MFA in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and I’ve been working as a professor and photographer since 2012.
2. What inspired you to make the work in Photography Now 2017? What is the work about? Please describe one piece, the evolution of the concept, and the process?
The images in this exhibition are from the series Eden, VT, a town located in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. This series is part of the larger project Imag[in]ing America, which depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory. In this series, I was interested in highlighting ideas of utopia and its aftermath as it relates to the region and the American experience. In both of the images featured in Photography Now 2017, Untitled – Man in Room 3 and Untitled – Female Solo, I highlight an increased sense of isolation and absence in places that represent a New England that is disappearing. Many of the town churches, local rooming houses, community centers, grange halls, and other public gathering places are now only frequented by a handful of senior citizens and a few dedicated families. While the younger generations play computer games and move to cites as soon as they possibly can, the remaining residents are trying desperately and often failing to maintain a more rural and self-sufficient lifestyle and to keep the doors to these local gathering places open. Contemporary American life is tinged with familiar modern conditions, the consistent movement of people and a corporate stranglehold on commerce so that everywhere is also anywhere or nowhere. I look for what remains of place-based distinctions and photograph subjects that often that have an archetypal quality. My search is for a kind of contemporary memory place. America as inheritance. Alan Watts said ‘A myth is not something simply untrue but rather a myth is an image, in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.’ Imag[in]ing America is my personal investigation into some of those myths.
3. Much of the work in Photography Now 2017 seems to describe a distance between the subject and the viewer, a disconnection, and/or a dystopian situation. How do you think your work relates to these ideas?
Since the industrial revolution and now with the digital revolution we live in a state of acceleration, our society is changing quickly, dramatically, our myths are breaking down. This creates a constant source of anxiety and disconnection, a sense that the ground is ever-shifting beneath our feet. I see this work as more contemplative than dystopian but that disconnection definitely shows up.
4. What are you working on now?
Currently, I’m working on a series of images made in and around the town of Buffalo, WY. Buffalo is one of numerous towns in America where people have rejected aspects of contemporary society in favor of a simpler and often more rural life that includes aspects of historical reenactment. It has been called histo-cinematic simulation or the Disneyland effect in which sanitized ideas of the past are mixed with everyday contemporary life in a nostalgic new romanticism that is both enticing and unsettling. Perhaps this is the result of our legacy of images and their narrative power to provide definitions in a world that is still shifting too rapidly for many to keep up.
5. What is the one photograph you always wanted to make but never could?
I approach my work as a kind of metaphorical memoir, a document of my cultural inheritance. There are many images in my mind of an America that I’m not sure exists anymore. The America my father knew and the one I’ve built in my mind from the stories he told me as a child. Perhaps my love for him and the fact that he is no longer here make me long for some of those more haunted and elusive memory images.
General exhibition information:
Photography Now 2017
November 4, 2017 – January 14, 2018
Juried by William Ewing
Featured Artists: Lars Anderson, Sarah Anthony, Ben Arnon, Sandra Bacchi, John Barnard, Emily Berl, Adam Bernard, Christopher Paul Brown, Tianqiutao Chen, Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Orestes Gonzalez, Tamar Granovsky, Alejandro Loureiro Lorenzo, Jeanette May, Zora Murff, Laurie Peek, Ceaphas Stubbs and Ayumi Tanaka.
See full exhibition information or exhibition guide (issuu.com).
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