Curatorial statement · Tamara Rafkin
Humans and objects: we have a long history with them, our use of them, our collections, our toys, and through all of those we weave narratives tied to objects. They tell stories about people, moments, beliefs and memories. They invoke fantasy, wishes and dreams: symbols of things yet to come and moments of the past.
This exhibition highlights four artists, Kathleen Vance, Norm Magnusson, Shari Diamond and Tamara Rafkin, all working with these concepts in various ways from their own perspectives, all with a sense of narrative in their works.
Vance's Traveling Landscapes create new narratives for cases and containers that have had a life, by building landscapes that evoke other places in the interiors of the object: new narratives for both the object and the viewer, through her feelings of the story tied to the container.
Magnusson's Memory Sale builds vignettes around objects from his home that he started to sort out during the 2020/2021 COVID quarantine. He creates a story for each object, binding a memory to it and offering the memory as the item for sale; the object itself is an added bonus. Art made from an intangible memory, bound in prose and bonded to a second-hand ready-made object.
Diamond's The 60 Year Project celebrates and reflects on entering a sixth decade of life by looking through snapshots and the stories tied to them. By altering the images through layers of processes, the work dissects how memory and one's own narrative work: how our view of memories changes over time until they become objects of their own.
Rafkin's Lost&Found series began with a fascination for how people who find a lost object set it somewhere prominent so the person who lost it can find it again. Found across cultures and continents, this behavior shows how humans empathize and are kind: knowing their own feelings for lost things, and often building a story about the item and its owner, they feel compelled to save it to be returned.
From landscapes that create stories to stories created around household items, reflections on one's own life story and stories lost and found, there are so many narratives we build around the objects we interact with. Both the objects and the stories become about us and the human condition. We are narrative creatures; storytelling is part of our souls and connects us all, sometimes through our things.
Kathleen VanceTraveling Landscapes · artist statement
My Traveling Landscapes series delves into the idea of travel and protecting our natural resources, in particular water sources. (This is why many of the Traveling Landscapes sculptures have an active flowing water component.) I want people to really investigate and have a sense of discovery with these installations and sculptures. I have been using primarily vintage travel cases, train cases and steamer trunks, to relate to a time when travel was slower and the distances between us and our homelands and foreign landscapes were more difficult to access. The cases act to abstract the idea of travel and romanticize its idyllic qualities.
I am always on the lookout for cases that have some indication of travel, with notes and markers which give a feeling that they have really been used for transporting someone's special or personal items. The landscapes created for each, and contained within, are inspired by these impressions.
Recently I have been experimenting with more unconventional cases, and with these less familiar travel cases the landscapes within have also expanded to more unconventional landscapes, as in Traveling Landscape, Assembly. I am thinking about a direct relationship between the contents and the container, distorting markers of scale. These new works also move toward ornamentation of the cases: one recent sculpture uses a very elaborate chest, chosen to expound on the preciousness of its contents. Very much like a treasure chest, its contents, rather than gold, myrrh or frankincense, are a bucolic landscape. Water and our open landscapes are our legacy to future generations and something that must be protected and cherished.
Norm MagnussonNorm's Memory Sale: fictional-ish stories attached to real objects I'm getting rid of
About a year ago, I was cleaning up the random kitchen implements drawer when I came upon a cookie cutter in the shape of a duck. It had probably been with me through a dozen or so moves, houses, apartments, etcetera, and I'd never ever used it. Maybe it was time to get rid of it, sneak it into a free pile at a neighbor's yard sale, or just throw it away.
Instead, I decided to create a fictional provenance for it: invent a story with the duck cookie cutter as the hero, or at least a key character. And I really enjoyed it, so I did it again. And again. And again.
Now I have 24 of these little stories completed, for 24 of these random objects, and I'm sharing a big bunch of them in this exhibition, and performing a smaller bunch of them at the gallery with improv guitar by the amazing Peter Dougan.
Shari DiamondThe 60 Year Project · artist statement
The 60 Year Project consists of 60 images representing 60 moments over 60 years. These images, selected from my family or personal archive for each year of my life, undergo a series of processes that strip away the details, leaving the essence of the moment. 60 years ago, I lay in a crib while my mother watched over me. I don't remember this moment, but a photograph tells me it happened. Our lives are a multitude of moments experienced, remembered and forgotten. Time passes, but do we notice? I see the changes that have occurred over time. In this series, I try to document these changes.
My art practice is an investigation into topics ranging from borders and boundaries, sexuality, gender, immortality and impermanence to human relations. If something interests or disturbs me, I want to consider it, meditate on it and understand it better. Process is integral to my practice. In each series, I search for the method that provides the most effective entry for my investigation. It is always photo based, though I use a multitude of analog and digital processes. Narrative is a constant thread throughout my work, speaking to larger political conditions rooted in my personal experience of difference.
Tamara RafkinLost&Found · artist statement
This work began with a fascination with how people, when finding a lost object, pick it up and place it somewhere to be seen, so that it can be found by the person who lost it. It reflects how attached we are to our things and the stories connected to them, and how we empathize with others through knowing what it feels like to lose something.
For me it shows a kindness that crosses all sorts of barriers, language, nationality, race, and brings us all together. It's one of the small ways we are all looking out for each other in the midst of life's chaos.
I've been photographing these objects since 2013, following some simple rules of my own: I never move an object, and I never photograph an object that I have found and placed myself. Since about the third or fourth object, I have always photographed each one twice: in close-up and in situ.
It is a body of work in process that may never be completed, but it is my own cultural anthropological study that constantly makes me smile and gives me hope for humanity.
