02.02.11
Hannah Starkey: Twenty-nine pictures
Mead Gallery: 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 carrefully 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 individual individuals – whether colleagues or people in the street – as her subjects, the way in which they capture her imagination is reflected in their cinematic presenetation 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 comrises 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 Iverson, 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 the 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 Iversen and a conversation between Hannah Starkey and Diarmuid Costello.
Mead Gallery
Warwick Arts Centre
Coventry
CV4 7AL
Hannah Starkey: Twenty-Nine Pictures runs at the Mead Gallery, part of the Warwick Arts Centre, until 12th March 2011. For more information visit www.warwickartscentre.co.uk
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