FRAGMENTS: Artists Exploring Photo-Materiality

The exhibition FRAGMENTS brings together the work of five multi-disciplinary artists who engage their photographs through various physical craft techniques, whether by the blade, needle or through more mechanized means. This is the first exhibition with the gallery for each artist. An opening reception will be held on April 10th from 3 – 6 pm.

The works on view each explore physical and psychological fragmentation through both content and construction. On a surface level, their images are distorted, patterned, or separated from the paper substrate through the artist's intervention. Beneath the surface, they reference the subjective ambiguity of history and "the porous nature of memory" as stated by artist Diane Meyer regarding her ongoing series Berlin which traces the former wall that split the city. Meyer’s pixelated embroidery materializes sections of her photographs, embedding a phantom of the structure’s 104-mile perimeter as it continues to linger in the consciousness of those who experienced its impact.

As the child of Baltic refugees, Krista Svalbonas’s laser-cut architectural studies are deeply personal testaments to the often-overlooked history of her ancestors, and thousands of others, experienced in displaced person shelters following the second World War. Her two most recent series, Displacement and What Remains, literally bare the emotional letters and traditional patterns that sustained their cultural identity through a fractured existence. New York-based artist and photographer David Samuel Stern's nearly decade-long series of mysterious Woven Portraits are constructed through a meticulous layering of three photographs that are physically handwoven together. Their cubic construction obscures the subject at close range but conjures a feeling of fleeting movement from a distance. The bold colors of Stern’s most recent work radiate from the archival vellum used to construct each unique piece. 

By extracting the backgrounds of her photographs from Wilderness, Theresa Ganz creates photo-sculptures barely discernable as natural foliage. They float on the wall as paper abstractions resembling prismatic tentacles or dense neural networks. Through her hand-cut compositions, along with various mixed media, her works use “the referential and literal quality of the photograph to create an altered reality” and challenge the traditional place of landscape photography in art history. Similarly, LA-based artist Georgina Reskala’s “un-threaded” photographs on fabric are dream-like, diffused views of the land and sea which have been re-photographed extensively, their details slipping away each time as a metaphor for memory and its gradual degradation. Sections of the final print are tediously extracted creating voids of information, referencing a history of intentional un-threading by textile weavers. 

For each of these artists, making a photograph is just the first step of their process that precedes a subsequent, sculptural element required to bring the work to a more nuanced and complete tactile format. Their methods and concepts will be addressed in forthcoming public talks with the artists.