Janet Malcolm "Burdock"
Lori Bookstein Fine Art
This event has ended.
During summers spent at a house in the Berkshires, Malcolm came to start gathering leaves of the burdock plant, a large “rank weed” with medicinal properties “that grows along roadsides and in waste places and around derelict buildings.” Propping them up individually in small glass bottles and shooting them head on, Malcolm strips them of their previous associations and turns them into veritable photographic subjects. Influenced by Richard Avedon’s unsparing portraits of famous people, Malcolm is particularly drawn to the “uncelebrated leaves” upon which the ravages of time, weather, insects or blight have defaced her subjects. Through careful selection, Malcolm’s burdock photographs become, in part, anthropomorphizing personal narratives, as well as homages to the tradition of botanical illustration of the 18th & 19th centuries.
[Image: Janet Malcolm "Burdock No. 17" (2005-07) Iris print, 20 x 13 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 09, 2008 to October 11, 2008