Vendredi 06 Mai 2016 11:29:03 par Nour Alahiane-lechevalier dans Expositions

I believe in Art as a means of transcendence and connection. My images are simply what I've made from what I have been given. I hope they have done justice to their sources and that they will, for a moment, ‘stay the shadows of contentment too short lived.'
-Josephine Sacabo

Josephine divides her time between New Orleans and Mexico. Both places inform her work, resulting in imagery that is as dreamlike, surreal and romantic as the places that she calls home.
Born in Laredo, Texas, in 1944, Josephine was educated at Bard College in New York. Prior to moving to New Orleans, she lived and worked extensively in France and England. Her earlier work was in the photojournalistic tradition and was influenced by Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She now works in a very subjective, introspective style, using poetry as the genesis for her work. Her many portfolios are visual manifestations of the written word, and she lists poets as her most important influences, including Rilke, Baudelaire, Pedro Salinas, Vincente Huiobro, Juan Rulfo, Mallarmé and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her images transfer the viewer into a world of constructed beauty.

© Josephine Sacabo

In Juana and the Structures of Reverie, Josephine combines collaged and distorted photographic images with a wetcollodion- on-metal process that dates back to the 19th century. She creates a world that is barely recognizable, hovering like a memory or a dream in the space between the concrete and the ineffable--beyond words. Throughout the work, half-materialized visions of certain elements appear and reappear--an apple, a bird, a window, the female form--as if to suggest that some kind of narrative is buried under the layers of fractured representation. But the project as a whole resists any linear reading, instead concerning itself with establishing an enigmatic set of conditions--loss, solitude, melancholy, nostalgia, etc.--that create a wholesome organic space for interpretation. In other words, rather than tell any particular story, these works are a stage for a number of potential stories that hinge upon these broader concepts. In balancing on the threshold between the real and the surreal, these images favor the poetic over the prosaic and the symbolic over the literal. These fine art works are from a collection of painted photogravures and wet collodion tintype portfolios.