Sandi Haber Fifield “After the Threshold”
Rick Wester Fine Art
This event has ended.
After the Threshold is the gallery’s third exhibition featuring work by Haber Fifield and her second solo exhibition here. Since the 1980s, her work has explored the visual, psychological and formal possibilities in creating composite pictures, whether it is the layering of images in the analog process of multiple exposure in camera; the graphic impact of creating grids and grid-like installation work or, as in the 2010 RWFA exhibition Big Girls: Large Format Photographs by Women Photographers, challenging logic by blowing apart the traditional expectation of ordered images on a gallery wall.
After the Threshold conveys a new approach. Here, a preset pictorial structure of three or four images demands a reading of photography as a unique, quixotic visual code. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote that “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the camera and the pen alike” and Haber Fifield is not shy to press this point. In After the Threshold, the noted photography writer Vicki Goldberg observes, “So what we are looking at in these photographs is often looking itself.”
The images Haber Fifield draws from are culled from her own archive of past and recent imagery. Recently however, she has extended her range of image making to include video. RWFA is very pleased to premiere As If Nothing Had Happened, 2013, a single channel two minute loop that threads through her four panels. Images that bask in the sun and disappear at night; that show weather both bucolic and fierce and that move in step with the artist’s walking and as she sits still while a young woman pulls on the oars of a rowboat while gliding over still water, populate the screen.
After the Threshold portrays a world of fractured ties between images made whole through the lyrical free-associative visual reasoning of a seasoned artist well schooled in the effects of collage. The themes of the work in the exhibition have been present in Haber Fifield’s work for years. The title of her first monograph, Walking Through the World established her posture in picture making. After the Threshold brings a carefree maturity to the process. Analytical and feminine, sensual and composed, contained yet freely borderless, Haber Fifield has taken her walk and has reported back that the world is filled with more wonder than any one picture can capture.
Media
Schedule
from May 02, 2013 to June 15, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-02 from 18:00 to 20:00