Alice Hargrave: Untitled (family pictures); landscapes, skyscapes, still lives, and interiors

Alice Hargrave: Untitled (family pictures); landscapes, skyscapes, still lives, and interiors by Aline SmithsonOctober 30, 2013

Exploring work focusing on family this week….

untitled(family pictures) ; residuals, pink light

Photographer Alice Hargrave has a unique interpretation of family. Her work is about the moments in between what surrounds the chaos of raising children and living with family–the intangible, out of focus, split second ethereal glimpses that is in juxtaposition to the whirling dervish of family life that surrounds it. Her work is emotional, poignant, and about the unspoken liminal spaces of time.

Alice is a photographic artist and educator; she has had several one-person and group exhibitions, including two one-person shows at The Chicago Cultural Center. She exhibits and is collected both nationally and internationally, and is included in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Nuveen Corporation, Outer Circle Corporation, and Rush Presbyterian Hospital among others. Her work has been seen at Yale University Art Gallery, The Smart Museum of Art (Chicago, IL.), The Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, Minnesota), The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Klein Art Works Gallery, and was represented by Carol Ehlers Gallery. Hargrave has received many awards for her work and has been published and reviewed in several journals. Currently she is an adjunct professor at Columbia College, Chicago.

Untitled (family pictures); landscapes, skyscapes, still lives, and interiors

Untitled (family pictures) explores the intersection of the ephemeral and domestic experience. This can be a momentary play of light within an intimate interior space, personal landscapes traversed or touched by human intervention, residual objects, or ever-changing undulating skies that can calmly shelter or hauntingly weigh heavy upon us.

I am interested in subjectively defining “family” in pictures and imaging domestic space, or experience without literally depicting home and family per se, but rather the feelings and experiences associated with family. I want to thread together extracts, transitory details of respite, moments and experiences that the camera seeks to stop but instead underlines the impossibility of photography to stop time.

untitled(family pictures) ; blue skies, #6

The cusp between lightness and darkness fascinates me.
That in between time, which is neither day nor night, underscores for me the passage of time. Moments of darkness just before nightfall when deep shadows are somewhat illuminated but are steadily being usurped by the dark. This movement mirrors the corners of the mind filled with faint memories. Dusk is ever so fleeting, analogous to the sense of loss we are constantly facing as we feel life racing by. There is a certain beauty in this richness of color, this patina or shroud, that also seems to speak of that inevitable loss, the loss of a moment, a single day, a childhood, a person, or an entire lifetime. An immediate “capture” is attempted and then there is the subsequent, inevitable loss characteristic to photography, making it the perfect tool for probing the fugitive nature of childhood, youth, memory, and landscape.

untitled(family pictures) ; residuals, mirror

Photography is the art of the fleeting, an attempt to catch hold of happiness. However futile that attempt may be, we still try to grab hold of time, but time is fickle.