Lori Grinker "Distant Relations"
Nailya Alexander Gallery
This event has ended.
Taken in Lithuania (2002), South Africa (2005), Ukraine (2008), and the US (2011) these 19 intimate color photographs create an impressionistic map of her family’s migration since its dispersal in the late 1800s from Western Lithuania.
Using medium format color film, Grinker chronicles her family’s diaspora with landscapes, portraiture, and interiors. Concentrating more on particular environments than people and practices, her landscapes and interiors focus on the atmosphere of the place. These fragmentary images stir the viewer’s memory and emotions and trigger wonder about our journey in life. Dr. Roy Richard Grinker, Lori’s cousin and a professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University, calls these carefully composed images “an absent presence,” and George Slade, former curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University speaks about them “constructing moments in which absence is a salient property and memory seems to be in the process of taking hold.” Grinker embeds philosophical questions within quotidian events, endowing personal stories with broader meanings of other peoples’ cultural identity, geographic belonging and rootedness. The present show is only the first chapter of Grinker’s search. Future work will take place in Argentina, Israel, the United Kingdom and Germany, reconnecting the family and forging links between past and present.
[Image: Lori Grinker "Untitled, Olhovka, Ukraine" (2008) archival pigment print 18.83 x 23.25 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 07, 2011 to October 15, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-13 from 18:00 to 20:00