Gigi Gatewood
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Work from Models, Representations & Self Contained Worlds and To Honest Seekers for Truth.
Sadly, I cannot tell you how I came across Gatewood’s work, but her approach to the peaceful yet tense still life drew me to it. Gatewood uses no text, only title, and has a fascinating habit of perching objects near table edges and corners that adds a particularly perilous quality to the seemingly placid still lives.
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Models, Representations & Self Contained Worlds
“How is the human understanding of the world described and what can we learn from the way we represent nature? Models and Representations and Self Contained Worlds, two series of still-life photographs of replicas of natural subjects, investigates these objects’ purpose and history, and how we create worlds within our world. My subjects—objects depicting flora, fauna, and the human body—function in various ways: they teach, they sell, they decorate, they idealize. These objects are romanticized and sometimes absurd translations of reality, infused with our understandings of the world around us and with our desire to gain control over it, thus creating a space that exists somewhere between reality and the imaginary.”
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To Honest Seekers for Truth (previously known as Knowing & Believing):
I photograph symbolic objects that bridge the gap between the universe and us to examine the different ways in which we search for answers about the unknown—from the scientific to the spiritual, from knowing to believing. The objects, whether a moon rock suspended in a transparent pyramid or a sheathed Newtonian telescope, fuse together the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible world. I use various strategies, including light and scale, to defamilarize the objects, reflecting the mystery in all belief systems. As this series reveals, I am, as one of my objects is inscribed, an “honest seeker for truth.”