SHARON HARPER
2011-12-19“One Month, Weather Permitting” is a series of photographic images of the night sky over Banff, Alberta in Canada. Utilizing multiple extended-exposure photographic techniques over several consecutive nights, Harper records the movement of the stars and allows the randomness of the marks made by the light trails they leave on film to highlight “chance” as an important aspect of the photographic process itself. What results is imagery that is “technological seeing”, so to speak; views of the night sky visible to the human eye only with the aid of the camera and the film media.
“Twelve Hours From Winter To Spring” is a series of landscape images` taken during a flight from Fairbanks, Alaska to Boston, Massachusetts over a period of twelve hours. Although the images record the change of landscape, light and scenery as shifts of location, one can also perceive the shift to be seasonal, from winter to spring; a trick of perception that separates what we see from how we interpret such information in our minds. Further, the imagery is presented in grid-form as a singular large-scale photograph, pushing discourse that could range from documentary to narrative, when in reality, it is wholly neither, as the aesthetic choices of the artist play an equal part in the final presentation of the images.
“Sun/Moon” is Harper’s latest body of work and also draws attention to the act of seeing as a two-part process; on one part, a physical act of reacting to visual stimulus and on another, a cognitive act of recognition and interpretation. By connecting a digital camera to a telescope and capturing multiple images within seconds, she mimics this act of looking and understanding on a subject that we would not be able to see directly (the sun and the surface of the moon) without the aid of the mediating instruments she has employed. Although distortions and reflections also result from this process, the sequential presentation of the images of the sun and the moon trace the experience of looking and analysis; a metaphor to “seeing” as a cumulative act and yet an elusive one, as it is imperfect and subject to chance.
Exhibition runs through to January 21st, 2012
Galerie Stefan Röpke
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
Cologne 50667
Germany
