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| hannah starkey | postmedia |
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| Hannah Starkey Once they learned the deconstructionist lessons of those postmodern American ladies of the lens, many women working in the visual arts today began approaching photography without the sociocultural chips on their shoulders that characterized so much work in the 80s. They would seem to have found fertile ground in a variety of approaches that are dismissive of the frontal confrontation with the media so typical of their Internet-based colleagues. These young women prefer the kind of expressive take that manifests their need to assert the self in a public arena. That led, among other things, to the rebirth of performance art and renewed success of much figurative art, including photography, during the 90s. And last but not least, one aspect that has become self-evident: many of today's women artists make use of a figurative expression that doesn't necessarily include or even specifically address women. The Irish-born artist Hannah Starkey, for example, makes photographs that span the continuum from fashion to conceptual behaviorism. Her brief experience as a fashion photographer, on the one hand, made her a technical perfectionist, so forget about anything to do with those blurry black & white conceptual images of the 70s. Starkey pays particular attention to questions of location and lighting, but the content of her images would seem to be focused elsewhere as the models appear to be telling us much more -- or much less according to ones point of view. Hers is the woman who stares dreamily at herself in the mirror, the man seen ascending an escalator as others descend. They are subjects who make use of their own physical presence to build unexpected pictorial structures, people who seem to be there in order to provide a different connotation to the space rather than simply occupying it, characters who remain now and forever on the verge of an interaction that will never take place. Unlike the manner with which photography was perceived half a century ago and continues to be perceived, as a documentary tool, in certain areas of today's artistic investigation, Starkey's approach to the medium is not intended to prove anything but to formulate mysteries and suggest ambiguities. Writing in Art Forum, Barry Schwabsky wrote of her work: "The image asks to be interpreted just because it withholds sufficient basis for interpretation. Out of such meanings, too obvious to be the right ones, Starkey constructs her mysteries." Gianni Romano |
courtesy zoom magazine |