Artist Clare Strand will continue her interrogation of the photographic medium by bringing new questions about our relationships with analogue and AI image-making. Her proposal is a response to a brief created by MA students. The brief invited artists to explore our relationships with the photographic and digital image. This exploration aimed to challenge conventional perceptions of memory and time in relation to the monument.
This commission is part of the ongoing Reimagining the Monument project at Sotheby’s Institute of Art which has brought students from across the Institute’s MA programs together to consider what a monument can and should be by commissioning new work.
The artist was asked to respond to the multifaceted ways in which technology shapes and challenges our sense of self or our interactions with others.
With an interest in commenting on the circulation and distribution of images Strand is an artist whose work is formed by photography and the changing status of photographs and images in contemporary society. Her works, mainly in photography but also in other mediums including installation and even painting, question the role of the image and how technology has changed our idea of how images are made. She refers to herself as an ‘artist who works with, but mostly against the photographic medium’. Thus, across her oeuvre, Strand challenges, references, builds on, and expands the history of photography with a distinctly contemporary and feminist position.
Strand’s work interposes photography with a material approach. In Snake 2017, she used found photographs of women and girls holding snakes with printed lines of AI generated snake poetry over the images. In her most recent exhibition, The Colder the Weather the Warmer the Hearts 2023, for NOUA Gallery, Bodo, Norway, Strand drew upon archival imagery from the Archive Nordland which she then printed on garments, reintroducing the local history into the community by staging a fashion show where local women wore the garments. In Flatland/Spaceland 2012 (pictured), she made 3 dimensional geometric shapes out of photo paper and in Men Only Tower 2017, a glass box on a plinth housed a totem of sixty-eight issues of the British magazine Men Only (no longer in circulation) that shamelessly stated “We don’t want women readers. We won’t have women readers.’’. In an act of subversion the artist placed her own images into the centrefolds of each magazine, sealed inside black envelopes.
The expansive idea of photography that Strand offers in these works is matched by an ambitious thinking of what the possibilities for the medium are.
Images from Clare Strand’s previous series: Flatland/ Spaceland 2012, showing Spaceland (colour)
About Spaceland (colour)
Edwin Abbot’s novella Flatlands (1884) offered the vision of dimensions beyond the observable, where a square can become a cube. Coincidently in the same year George Eastman received his patent for photographic Uilm, which led the way to the Uirst hand held mainstream cameras and the mass conversion of the 3 dimensional into the 2 dimensional. With Flatland and Spaceland, traditional processed photographic paper is cut and folded to make a sequence of three-dimensional platonic shapes. The 2D templates (not pictured) are framed alongside. (Image and text courtesy of the artist.)
For further information about Clare Strand's work, exhibitions, and projects, click here.