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3/12/2003

inSTATES

Galerie H. Kollmann, Wien

Group Artist Statement

This is the work of five photographers whose artistic careers are expanding. The roots of their photography can be traced to a shared foundation: each of these photographers graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology between 1995 and 1999.

Since leaving Rochester, New York, they have documented their movements and settlements each in his or her own distinctive style. This collective display of their work has been titled ''In States'' because all of the work was photographed in the United States of America. Each photographer deliberately selected images that fit within this parameter but could also create a larger statement beyond physically roaming the United States.

Stephen Mallon's photos have stopped time at vacation spots, catching the isolation and absence of function during the dormant season of a Funland in New Jersey. The noises, smells, salty sea sand, and sweaty crowds have dispersed in his pictures. Aging ghosts haunt these landscapes. They take up space, never able to hide even in harsh winter weather. These fixtures use the empty space as their breathing room and their hearts are the center of the image. The inanimate structures vibrate with grandiosity; they want to be used every day instead of only during summer days. Even the young summer-clad woman is permanent. She will never age at this Funland, a new generation will always find that same spot.

Erika Larsen photographs the fleshy details of family life using an inner, personal light to get at the core and protective layers that compose her family. The photos express the participation and care needed to navigate and live within a family. She uses her camera to investigate what she has missed but what her subjects remember. Her photographic palette assigns color to these emotions. She carefully assigns her brothers, sisters, cousins, father, and mother a luminous light and color that propel their motion within the photograph. These people vibrate with clenched emotions that the camera wants to gently release.

Arabella Schwarzkopf draws on the community within one building as her subject, the apartment building she lived in while she resided in Brooklyn, New York. One might approach this as a building of strangers, people who barely know their neighbor's faces. However, Arabella's photographs don't seem to include walls; it is as if each person or family live together in one large space. Her photos take a building of assumed strangers and create a community apparent only within an image.

Chris Jones' photos reveal the sudden passage of time. Chris was moving when he took these pictures. Even though the landscape is immobile Chris has provided motion by taking the picture. The photos blur and produce the sense of lifetimes passing by without much change occurring. It is tempting to classify these drive-by photographs as snapshots but they contain too much solitude and information about a landscape to be classified as personal.

Laura Glazer's photos were taken in five states. They have a comic sense of what is beautiful and what remains innocent. She carefully chooses the frames of the scenes to emphasize that the unusual is always present but can be seen as lovely and common if consciously and naturally framed. Hats haphazardly but intentionally hung on a bedroom wall with a television antenna quietly entering the left side of the picture. Twins laughing as they accompany each other on a short train trip home. A screen door attached to its broken coil hinge. Bare legs lingering outside a private photo booth at a state fair. These scenes are full of colors and light, the subjects in each are shiny and crisp.

These photos were put together in a group because they present what it's like to live in one country that is divided into separate states. Chris and Laura physically travel between these states, often searching for contrasts and commonalities in landscapes and people. Stephen's work is an examination of a location which is traveled to at a designated time, while Erika and Arabella are watching states that are traveled from at any time: the family and home. There are feelings and movements in these states that are often concealed. These works examine the arrival, departure, and something in between within the United States and the states we live in.

Galerie H. Kollmann
Neustiftgasse 16, im Durchhaus
Vienna

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