Exhibition Dates | December 2- January 7, 2017
Public + Artistsâ Reception | December 2nd, 5:30-9:00 pm
Featured Artwork: The Approach
To view the other artists visit the Home exhibition online at the Center for Fine Art Photography.
Kevin Millerâs Statement
Serene, comforting, intimate, eloquent, secure, fragile, uncertain, precarious, even ambivalent. All these words can well describe any number of images in this exhibition. Home is such a wonderful and universal concept that it was always going to elicit profound engagement by these photographers. It is a deeply felt notion, but one which manifests so completely differently in each of our hearts and minds. It is a notion that is eventually discovered, identified and expressed in so many different ways and through so many unique prisms of belief, experience and perspective. The range of work was astounding; but how to pull some common threads together, give some emphasis to emerging patterns of thought, concerns and pre-occupations about HOME?
All of these photographers have clearly articulated their particular vision or concept of HOME. Their lenses and sensibility are directed to an enormous range of manifestations of home. Firstly, here in our privileged first world milieu we have images of secure comfort, even indulgence and intimacy. We also see images drawn from the margins of our own cultural moment; homelessness, improvised dwellings and living rough, right in our midst. We see what were once secure homes filled with life now abandoned, crumbling, empty or vanquished. These images quietly whisper an unease and uncertainty that lay beneath our comfort and security.
In some hands the lens examines other cultures where our own sense of home and our expectations would find little to be confident about. We see the lives of the less affluent and the more modest aspirations of people who seem closer to the land. People who have a more austere and essential life, with their elegantly spare interiors uncluttered by a surfeit of consumer possessions that are stripped bare to the essence of home; shelter, safety, community, family, wholeness. We come to these images, I believe with more than a small dose of admiration, even envy, for what might to some seem now like a âParadise Lostâ of wholeness, family and identity. But we also have images drawn from a darker sense of the erosion and precariousness of home in a more hostile world for some who must constantly struggle against the natural elements or the vagaries of government bureaucracy.
So, now we all come to our own thoughts, our wistful recollections and our warm reflections in the midst of these photographs that have made visual and manifest in the world; the sensibilities that each photographer has distilled and made still in one perfect image.
_Kevin Miller
August 2016