NYAB Event - Edie Winograde “Sight, Seen”

Edie Winograde “Sight, Seen”

The Front Room

This event has ended.

In this series Winograde captures the temporal relationships between past and present through landscape photography and unstaged photographs taken in American national parks and monuments throughout the United States. These photographs expose the mundane moments and often unnoticed coincidences that occur to travellers and tourists against the backdrop of grandeur that is the American “Wilderness.” In this series Winograde captures the collision of nature, recent and ancient history, and human nature experienced all at once.

Winograde’s photograph “Niagra Falls Stairs” takes the viewpoint of a rigid, soggy red boardwalk and series of staircases, sprawling across the rocks, with red vertical boards extending into the air and cascading water vapor above them. The alien-ness of this strange architectural feature in this otherwise seemingly untouched stately landscape is a perfect metaphor for mankind’s intrusion and simultaneous coexistence with the vast macrocosm we inhabit.

These sites are fixed points in the American consciousness. Tourists know them as destinations. As an audience, most people know them even if they never go to them, because painters, photographers, writers and cinematographers have depicted these landscapes, used them as symbols in their work (of nature, of conquest, of the Sublime, of Manifest Destiny, etc.) and told their stories—in both historical fact and legendary fiction.

Winograde balances an impulse to experience these sites in their raw current state, with a manipulated experience created by the infrastructure in place that packages the view and history for ‘the visitor’. Winograde’s photographs compress time and space, finding the moments where personal history infuses historical sites with a new energy.

Winograde has previously show at Front Room with her series “Place and Time: Re-enactment Pagent Photographs” documenting the historical re-enactments of events in the history of Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, presented in their original locales. Winograde’s work has been exhibited internationally and at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The San Diego Museum of Art, amongst many others.