Review

Untitled by Hannah Shepherd uses manipulated photographs of her own family to comment on how members of contemporary society now view images, especially those of people that they know. The slide is universally viewed as culturally irrelevant, images of a family vacation or a significant event are no longer shared in a living room but instead are taken out of the confined and personal setting and placed on the most global platform possible, the internet. Yet Hannah takes images that should be foreign to the viewer, photos of her personal family, and uses them in a way that allows a stranger to experience a vague sense of ownership and familiarity to them. The retro image of the boy about 9 years old sitting for his school photo is not just a photo of someone else, it is a cloudy memory of the photos in your own drawer. That awkward photo taken by the Christmas tree is not filled with strangers but instead your crazy Aunt Ginny and belligerent Uncle George. There is a universal familiarity about family photos that allows this piece to resonate with the viewer in a less superficial way.

The piece itself is composed of a series of over 200 slides with the white framing broken apart and the photo copied twice and juxtaposed against each other with a small loop of tape. The slides are lined up horizontally and the pictures read from left to right. The piece is backlit by a vertical fluorescent light that does not fully illuminate the outer edges of the rows and is most concentrated in the center of the object. The outside of the piece is covered in a white see-through fabric. The overall form of the work consists of 17 rows of slides randomly staggered, with the images arranged both chronologically and intuitively.

I think that the piece has a real energy to it; I think that maybe by virtue of it being lit it has a quality that people are really drawn towards. I do think that it could be lit better so that there is a more uniform glow and so each slide gets the same amount of light. I think that having the cord either hidden or somehow getting a cordless light would also complement the piece. I think that there are a few issues regarding how the slides are put together, the center seems a bit sunk in compared to the edges, but I think those issues are also pretty easily fixed.

In relation to contemporary artists I think that Hannah definitely draws on some of the ideas promoted by Liz Steketee who exhibited her own manipulated photos in Faulconer gallery at the beginning of the year. Both the collection of slides and the kodachrome polaroids that Steketee are especially approachable. I think that for both of these artists what is being depicted and how the images are formatted and shown are completely unpretentious which is something that I value.

-Betsy Wright