December 8 – January 8, 2023
Artist Reception Saturday December 10, 4 to 6pm
The photographic objects in this exhibition – chemigrams, gelatin silver prints, photograms, lumen prints and polaroids – oscillate between light and darkness, representational and abstract, and ephemeral and permanent. Links between disparate photographs are evidenced by stains and traces of chemistry, repeated imagery, and formal elements such as color and shape. I utilize these visual aesthetics to describe durational time, the layering of experiences, personal and collective loss, and the tension between image and object.
By creating images that will ultimately disappear or deteriorate into something else, I seek to challenge established notions of process, permanence and completion. What does it mean to make a photograph that is purposely fugitive? How can one utilize the materiality of the photographic medium to describe loss? Can the process by which the work is created become the work itself? Although the images do not directly address such questions, I view the work as a lyrical rendering of photography’s singular ability to visually depict essential truths about our lived experiences, evidenced by the creation of unique, non-reproducible objects imbued with marks and confirmation of their own existence.
Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials, including unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives, in non-traditional ways to express ideas integral to the medium of photography, specifically its complex relationship to time, space and memory. Minahan has released two publications with Datz Press, an end and a beginning (2022) and NOTES (2019). Her books are held in the collections of The New York Public Library, International Center for Photography Library, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Research Library and Stanford University Library, amongst others. Minahan has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Gwangju, South Korea), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona), Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, Washington) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, Massachusetts). In 2021, she was awarded artist residencies at the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Program and Studios at MASS MoCA.
