©Sandi Haber Fifield, TY22_410, 44×78

Sandi Haber Fifield has a legacy of expanded seeing, using photographic images in new and experimental approaches. Each new body of work, in book or exhibition form, challenges us to see differently, to find a new road map for explaining the world we live in. As we move through life, we visually collect bits and pieces—-a cinder block wall, a lonely cactus, bits of wall paper, and leaves sprawled out on a walkway. At first glance they are unremarkable, but when combined with a crescendo of shape and form, we experience these visual collections as a diary of sorts. Her newest series, The Thing in Front of You, was started during lock-down, and Fifield shares that “they visualize the ways in which we sort and assemble disparate bits of reality and organize them into a coherent and harmonious whole, while maintaining the sensation of collision and disruption that is the very nature of modern experience.”

This new work is a series of unique photo-based objects with various materials – dibond, plexiglass, wood, rubber, plastic, and metal screws: ( TY in the file names are Unique Hand Collaged Archival Pigment Prints on Canson paper) and  3-D Works (identified as TYO on file titles).

The Thing in Front of You will open at Yancey Richardson Gallery opens January 11, 2024.

Sandi Haber Fifield (b.1956) received her MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1981. Her photographs are held in several private and public collections, and she has widely exhibited her work throughout the United States at numerous galleries and prominent museums including: The Art Institute of Chicago, The DeCordova Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art. Haber Fifield has published four monographs and her work is included in various additional publications. She lives and works on Shelter Island, New York.

Follow on Instagram: @sandihaberfifield

©Sandi Haber Fifield, TY22, 404, 36.5×65.5

©Sandi Haber Fifield, TYO23, 448, 14×14

The Thing in Front of You  

 My visual cues come from what I find in the world; combined imagery has been my point of departure throughout my career. In the studio I challenge the objective reality of the photograph and transform it into something else. I am driven to find music in the cacophony that bombards us.

 The Thing in Front of You began after Covid lockdown in 2021. The health crisis reminded me of our fragility and the fractured nature of the world, yet despite isolation, we are never totally alienated from the times in which we live. Much has changed. Trumpism, destruction of property, environmental catastrophe, personal loss, increased racism, divisive political systems – yet the air is cleaner and there remains extraordinary beauty and joy to be found. How do we make sense of this? In life, we synthesize the random and discordant information that confronts us, and I find that process mimicked in artmaking. To a greater degree than my previous works, these images foreground the process itself. They visualize the ways in which we sort and assemble disparate bits of reality and organize them into a coherent and harmonious whole, while maintaining the sensation of collision and disruption that is the very nature of modern experience. – Sandi Haber Fifield

Excerpts from The Things in Front of Us by Mark Alice Durant:

“….from her earliest forays into in-camera experimentation of the 1980s to the monumental photographic collages she is making today, Haber Fifield has pushed the medium of photography beyond the conventional frame…. Haber Fifield’s layered images are visual analogs of time’s fluidity and the slipperiness of memory, and in that sense, she freed her images from the discontinuous seconds of the camera’s fractioned shutter…. “

“Even the title of this exhibition, The Thing in Front of You, coaxes us to pay attention to the full sensual and perceptual experience of encountering her new work…. By collaging and colliding disparate imagery, Haber Fifield’s work resists the evidentiary impulse in favor of an experience of suspended recognition; one cannot rely on the conventions of photographic framing to fulfill the promise of meaning.”

“The smaller mixed-media pieces are gem-like visual puzzles, full of signifiers—a patch of lawn, a hedge, a metal-latticed chair, a hand proffers ripening cherries…. In some ways her photocollages are like visual non-sequiturs that encourage us to loosen stubborn habits of seeing and understanding photographs, and by extension the visual world we encounter in our everyday lives.

“Take a moment to have a closer look. Observe, for example, how Haber Fifield carves into the picture plane to create forms and movement that lead us to surprising juxtapositions…

Odd as it may seem, I think of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, an icon of Romanticism. Friedrich’s canvas is a manifesto of the primacy of a poetic interiority—the singular male figure contemplating the enormity of creation. Haber Fifield is of course, an artist of a different time, making art in an era of fragmentation and alienation, in which the landscape does not intimate the sublime but is instead a contested territory, a poisoned and compromised Eden.”