Complicating the Identity Narrative

Abstract

The potential for individual experience each human carries is crucially unique, surpassing the increasingly categorical modes of identity that have become our covenant with human culture. While partially inaccessible to anyone else, the complex meaning each of us finds in this world is detectable to others through our interaction with that meaning. In our image-based contemporary world, meaning is expressed and gathered more and more through pictures. Photography remains an increasingly democratic medium of expression, documentation, and inibrmation dissemination, and the world is connected through an unending chain of images. We probably consume as many photographs in a day as we do calories, says Kitty Hubbard, an artist, an associate professor of Art at The College at Brockport: State University of New York, and curator of Regarding Place: Photo Media Invitational, an exhibition recently held at Brockport's Tower Fine Arts Gallery. Amid so much photographic noise, says Hubbard, the four exceptional artists included in this exhibition give us pause to consider and explore the many implications of the power of photo-based media. (1) In Regarding Place, diverse applications of the photographic image were used to explore issues of identity, and time. Transpiring within an academic context, the initial spark of active engagement generated by the exhibit was reignited within the gallery space through the month of February and into March. Hubbard designed an experience for students that included weekly Skype chats with the artists and a forum page dedicated to the exhibition on the as-yet uneclipsed social media force of Facebook. Angela Kelly's current body of work, shared in this exhibit, is a series of contemporary documentary photographs of places in Northern Ireland paired with diminutive portraits from the artist's own family album. Photographs resonate with me as repositories of history beckoning the viewer to a new understanding of place, explained Kelly's artist's statement. Catharsis: Images of Post Conflict Belfast 2010 11 connects the history of a place through the juxtaposition or modern urban and rural landscapes, their geographic coordinates, and traditional family portraits and snapshots taken by her father in Belfast in the 1960s. The private experience of the artist in these environs and their meaning exist only in the realm of memory--not quite tangible to t he viewer, but anchored for our exploration by each photographic pairing. The then-and-now groupings relate the personal and particular to a public aftermath of conflict, where psychic scars on the war-torn landscape remain for Kelly despite the fbrward march of time. In Bird's Eye View .f om The Black Mountain of the Peace Wall divide between the catholic and Protestant West Belliist and beyond (2010), an aerial shot of a suburban housing development is paired with a snapshot of a trio of seated ladies, each of whom bears stories associated with the space undetected by viewers of the landscape. In another shot, adolescent boys loiter amid towers of shipping pallets and mounds of tires under a heavy sky, and we wonder how their youth compares to that of the 1960s children in the smaller accompanying image. Kelly's oeuvre points at t he intangible meaning of tethered somewhere between the boundaries of what is seen, sensed, and remembered. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The inner-outer dichotomy offered in i he works of Pinky Bass leads the viewer to regard the precious mysteries of the body in more conscious ways, amid increased cultural fixation upon all things skin-deep. In Zodiac Perceptions (2008), an installation of four colorful and plush organs made of fabric, crocheted silk, thread, and applied digital images representing the heart, lungs, uterus, and intestines were mounted to the wall, each with a looped strip of a series of photographs of bodies hanging below. …