Hannah Starkey: Twenty-Nine Pictures
The Mead Gallery is hosting a major exhibition of works by photographer Hannah Starkey. Twenty-Nine Pictures “examines the development of a remarkable body of work, and marks the transfer of her image-making from film to digital photography”. The exhibitionm which runs from 15th January until 12th March, is curated by Diarmuid Costello of the Philosophy Department of the University of Warwick. The Mead Gallery is located at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry CV4 7AL.
Press Release
Hannah Starkey: Twenty-Nine Pictures
Mead Gallery
Opening party:
14th January 6:30-8:30pm
Exhibition dates:
15th January - 12th March 2011
Twenty-nine striking works unite for the first major solo show in ten years by internationally renowned photographer Hannah Starkey
Reconstructing scenes from the everyday, Hannah Starkey infuses them with the stylisation of film that is characteristic of her work. Her photographs emerge from a split second and yet are resolved into what appears as an extended moment in time. These carefully composed scenarios have the sense of compressed narratives, offering a rich and detailed story presented to us through the smallest of clues: the position of a glass; the pool of shadow; the averted gaze of the figure.
Twenty-Nine Pictures, Starkey’s first solo museum exhibition for ten years, examines the development of a remarkable body of work, and marks the transfer of her image-making from film to digital photography with brilliant effect. The artist invites us to acknowledge the alienation and the redemption present in contemporary life in pictures of remarkable beauty and extraordinary intelligence.
Casting the most diverse individuals – whether colleagues or people on the street – as her subjects, the way in which they capture her imagination is reflected in their cinematic presentation in her work. Her female protagonists are often pre-occupied, gazing back into the picture or outwards, beyond the viewer. The richness, harmony and economy of her compositions create a reciprocity between the pensive, pre-occupied figure and the setting. Part of the compelling nature of Starkey’s work is this precise tension between figure and environment, where each appears to reflect and define the other.
“The cinematic mode of contemporary photography comprises a diverse range of practices and Starkey’s nearnarrative photography is one particular type that needs to be differentiated from Cindy Sherman’s mimicry of film production stills or Gregory Crewdson’s elaborate staging of cinematic scenarios. What all of these artists’ work has in common, however, is the evocation of the quintessentially cinematic emotions of desire, doubt or anxiety. This strand of photographic art is defined as much by a certain cinematic sensibility, as by the strategy of staging scenarios for the camera…”
Margaret Iversen, Co-Director of the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography’
The exhibition is curated by Diarmuid Costello of the Philosophy Department of the University of Warwick who, with Margaret Iversen, is Co-Director of the AHRC funded research project, ‘Aesthetics after Photography’. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Margaret Iverson and a conversation between Hannah Starkey and Diarmuid Costello.
Photo: Untitled, 2004 by Hannah Starkey
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