We are thrilled to be hosting an online conversation with Griffin exhibition artist Katalina Simon tonight, August 20th at 7pm Eastern.
For tickets see the Events page of our website.
© Katalina Simon, “Apple Tree,” All Rights Reserved
Her beautiful series Land Beyond the Forest is hanging in our satellite gallery Griffin @ WinCam here in Winchester. The exhibition ends September 27th. We hope if you get a chance to get to Winchester you stop by and see this lovely body of work.
Katalina Simon is a British/Hungarian photographer whose work centers on the passage of time and cultural memory. Her interest in photography began when, as a child, she was told that taking pictures was not allowed in many public spaces in communist Hungary and she observed how precious photographs were to her family separated by the Iron Curtain.
Simon’s photography emphasizes her strong connection with history and the mood of the environments she photographs. Her image making is only part of a larger goal of experiencing a place, learning about a new culture or community.
Katalina holds a BA in Russian from the University of Bristol in England and is a graduate of the Professional Photography Program at the New York Institute of Photography. She is an exhibited member of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont and Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, MA.
© Katalina Simon, “Ana’s Kitchen” All Rights Reserved
The Land Beyond the Forest is an ongoing series depicting a fading way of life in rural Transylvania. This mountainous and remote region of Eastern Europe is steeped in history and lore. The rugged Carpathian Mountains kept invaders at bay and kept the remote villages isolated from the passage of time.
I am drawn time and again to this region and these people because it reminds me of a way of life that I experienced at my grandparent’s village in Hungary every summer. As a child, I was oblivious to the hardships that people faced and experienced only kindness and warmth. With my camera I work to recapture this feeling of storybook wonder and show domestic tableaux and rural people as I remember them.
© Katalina Simon, “Time with Bunica” © Katalina Simon, “Ana’s Kitchen” All Rights Reserved
For this exhibition I am focusing on the last generation of women who live this traditional rural life. My hope is to show the magic and poetry of the women who inhabit the “The Land Beyond the Forest.”
The intimate domestic space shown in Sora Woo’s photographs of her grandparents at home in South Korea is both a physical and psychological space. Physically, the place is the grandparents’ apartment, which provides context for their relationship. The space they occupy sitting or sleeping frames their activity, but more revealing is the particular space in between them. They sit in close proximity but are often at different angles, as if in different worlds or states of mind, and in fact, they are indeed separated by the grandfather’s condition of dementia. Woo’s grandmother is his caregiver, and her devotion and sense of duty are indicated by her constant, close presence. In the photograph of them posed together, facing front, she is gazing directly at the photographer, while his eyes are turned away. His focus is elsewhere. The important space of this work is the internalized space of this difference in mental acuity and all that it implies; the grandfather is in his own reality, while the grandmother is attuned to his condition, responsible for his welfare, and living with her own response, which includes a loyal sadness and her own fatigue.
The photographer, who was reared by these grandparents, has disappeared into the role of observer; no longer the child being taken care of, she is now the photographer with empathy for the situation, and perhaps, curiosity to see her grandfather in the role she once played herself, the innocent to be looked after. The pictures are about three kinds of memory, the one the photographer, who has left to study in the U.S. and has now come back to make photographs, brings with her in reacting to a new set of circumstances; the memory that the grandmother has for the 60 years in which her life was joined with her husband’s; and the grandfather’s memory, now fixed in an experience of the present.
The gravity of these sensibilities overlapping in a confined space is evoked by quiet, subtle shifts in the positions and gestures of the two companions in their daily routines. Their actions are now circumscribed by the grandfather’s condition, but their dignity and individuality are still apparent. The profound meaning of this dedication between two people, and of the careful and precise scrutiny by the photographer, builds through the series, each image adding depth and insight into a moving, clear vision of the final stages of a lifetime.
