Open through February 13, 2011, the Seattle Art Museum will present the exhibition Amy Blakemore: Photographs, 1988-2008. Ranging from black-and-white street photographs from the late 1980s to recent portraits and landscapes, the exhibition brings together nearly 40 photographs in a twenty-year survey of the Houston, Texas-based artist’s work.
Originally rooted in traditions of documentary photography, American artist Amy Blakemore compares the act of taking pictures to the experience of serendipitously gathering broken bits and lost objects during a long walk. This exhibition demonstrates that, throughout her career, Blakemore’s photographs have maintained a tantalizing sense of interrupted or incomplete narrative – what at a glance may appear to be a banal mise en scène becomes with further inspection a mysterious and psychologically penetrating view of the world we live in.
Blakemore’s work is in part defined by her embrace of low-tech cameras with limited range of focus. Her use of such idiosyncratic tools can bring a number of unpredictable irregularities to her compositions, including partially blurred passage and a compressed depth of field that, at times, becomes vertiginous. At the same time, her compositions are rigorously composed. Through skillful printing techniques she coaxes a remarkably nuanced palette in both black and white and color, and she manipulates the idiosyncrasies of her photographs, capturing the ways in which memory at once records and distorts visual information.
CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST SEPTEMBER 2, 7 PM
In conjunction with the exhibition, Blakemore and curator Marisa C. Sánchez discuss the artist’s approach to photography in a gallery talk September 7 in SAM’s third-floor photography galleries. Free with museum admission. More information at www.seattleartmuseum.org.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE AND ORGANIZATION
Amy Blakemore: Photographs, 1988-2008 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue distributed by Yale University Press, with essays by the exhibition’s curator, Alison de Lima Greene, as well as Chrissie Iles, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and SAM’s Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Marisa C. Sánchez. The exhibition is curated by Alison de Lima Greene, curator of contemporary art and special projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It was curated in Seattle by Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at SAM.
Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988–2008 has been organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additional support for the Seattle presentation was provided by individual donors.
www.seattleartmuseum.org
