Artist's Statement
<span class="text"><font color="#CCCCCC" class="text"> <font style="line-height: 20px;"><font size="3" style="color: rgb(153, 204, 0);">URBAN RELICS, SLOW GLASS AND SANCTUM GALLERIES STATEMENT</font><br /> <br /> After the shattering events of 9/11, I felt the need to photograph the streets of New York City where I was born and raised. This was a sharp departure from my previous work, which had consisted primarily of hand-painted figure studies photographed in a studio environment, using traditional black and white methods. These images, made with a digital camera, are predominantly close-ups of abandoned buildings, walls covered in graffiti, rusted metal, peeling paint, and dilapidated fences. These decaying structures called out to me. I was fascinated by the way neglect and exposure to the elements transformed intact and integrated structures into separate decaying elements. Like all things organic, man-made constructions obey the same life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. Traveling along the same time/space continuum by forces seen and unseen as everything in our universe, all things organic and inorganic alike interact with and upon each other, creating uniqueness both beautiful and hideous at each interval.</font> <p> </p> <font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font> <p><font style="line-height: 20px;">For several months I focused on windows as I found them on the streets; in sunlight or in shade, wet or dry, damaged, broken or whole, covered or uncovered, dirty or clean, with light behind or without, composed of glass bricks or single panes; all mysterious by what they elusively revealed hidden in their depths. The glass either reflected my literal perception of the world around me, or exposed those metaphors concealed deep within my unconscious mind.</font></p> <font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font> <p><font style="line-height: 20px;">I wandered the neighborhoods searching out those things we pass by and usually never notice thousands of times a day. I looked for the beautiful hidden beneath the façade and the message in the peeling paint. Taken together these photographs show a magnified detail of the richness and complexity of inorganic life cropped from the larger image of the living city.</font></p> <font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font> <p><font style="line-height: 20px;">In the early spring of 2005, my father passed, propelling me to the other side of one of lifes great divides. This coincided with a trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on a cold, windy day when only the most courageous of plants had begun to put out their spring shoots. I photographed those early buds and young leaves with interest and nothing more. However, within a month, I needed to go back, and back again to inhale the green air, to seek out the secret life of plants and flowers and fish and insects. I am still going to the Garden and will continue to do so to reconnect myself with the cycles of life.</font></p> <p><font style="line-height: 20px;"><font size="3"><span style="color: rgb(153, 204, 0);">WHAT'S FOR DINNER GALLERY STATEMENT</span></font><br /> </font></p> <p><font style="line-height: 20px;">Food is the sustenance of life. <br /> <br /> Our food supply has been in the media spotlight recently. Never before in the history of the planet has food been so industrialized and globalized to the extent that something caught, killed or grown continents away may be had for the asking.<br /> <br /> However, this industrialization of what we put into our bodies comes with a heavy price tag that cannot only be measured in dollars. Contamination in the food pipeline, poor nutritional value and carcinogens are only part of a much larger scenario — the disconnection as a culture, between what we put on our plates and how it got there (how it is grown, raised, harvested, processed, slaughtered, etc.).<br /> <br /> I have always been fully aware that the beefsteak served to me in a restaurant comes from an animal raised on a ranch, slaughtered and butchered perhaps thousands of miles away before finding its way to my knife and fork. But I never stopped to consider the details — whether the cows were treated humanely, what they were fed, how they were killed. As these details were revealed to me through news reports and magazine articles I was filled with unease but did not stop eating meat.<br /> <br /> Then again at a local food market, in the presence of tanks of fish, barrels of frogs, crabs piled one upon the other, all awaiting their doom, I felt the same unease at this tableau of living food.<br /> <br /> Finally, when passing my local butcher shop I stopped to stare at the carcasses complete with heads, eyes and tongues that were hung in the window from which I had previously averted my eyes. Chops wrapped in brown paper and frozen chickens in plastic were one thing, but whole animals flayed and bloody with dead staring eyes prominently displayed were quite something else. It somehow seemed disrespectful to the animals.<br /> <br /> This feeling abruptly crystallized into a new awareness and a new project — to examine and record photographically, raw food, really raw food, either still alive or newly dead in order to understand the relationship between myself and the creature that will ultimately become part of my own living body.<br /> <br /> </font> </p></font></span><br>
Home
|
Galleries:
Urban Relics
Slow Glass
Sanctum
What's for Dinner
|
Artist's Statement
About
Contact
Print Purchases
Comments
Exhibits, Awards, Links
send email
copyright 2002-2008, Barbara E. Leven. All rights reserved.
