Krista Wortendyke: The States Project: Illinois

Krista Wortendyke: The States Project: Illinois by Kelli ConnellSeptember 21, 2016

©Krista Wortendyke

Krista Wortendyke’s work examines photography’s role in documenting violent acts while bringing viewers to a crossroads of confrontation regarding race crimes, gun violence, and the ethics of war. Wortendyke’s work is featured in This Heat, a group exhibition at Weinberg/Newton Gallery up through the end of the month.

Krista Wortendyke (b. 1979, Nyack, New York) is a Chicago-based conceptual artist. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College in 2007. Her ongoing work examines violence through the lens of photography. Her images are a result of a constant grappling with the mediation of war and brutality both locally and globally. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Schneider Gallery and Weinberg/Newton Gallery in Chicago, The Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA, and many other venues across the United States. Her work is also in the permanent collections of both the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Krista is currently an adjunct professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University.

Interventions

Our environment is saturated with imagery. Over time, the viewing public has lost the ability to connect emotionally with images, even the most horrific. By obscuring the parts of these images that define them as historically significant and re-drawing the gesture of what lays beneath, I have compromised the meaning of both the old and the new images. What is then created makes the new image visible as well as redefining what is seen in the old image, thus creating a different relationship than originally intended between the image and its viewer. In doing so, the viewer is forced to imagine and/or intuit what is erased, compelling them to examine these images in new ways that elicit emotional and thought provoking responses.