Foto Relevance is pleased to present Restless Symmetries: Barbara Strigel and Kelda Van Patten. This show marks the gallery's debut exhibition of works by each artist, selected from portfolio reviews at PhotoLucida 2022. Restless Symmetries will be on view at Foto Relevance from July 16th through September 3rd, 2022.
Barbara Strigel’s work investigates architecture as the visual language of a city, not separate from its inhabitants, but a part of the same constellation. Her digital collages, created with her photographs, drawings, and physically torn and layered paper, become constructed architectural spaces reaching for a sense of visual unity. These fragmentary moments are resonant, sensory perceptions that invite connection to space. Strigel's work explores both the physicality of the city as well as the people who navigate it, the balance of connection and separation within the urban space.
Kelda Van Patten’s constructed photographs involve a variety of physical and digital processes to occupy liminal spaces between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin. Her still life images reference the melancholic curiosities of kitsch, as well as Memento Mori and Vanitas, visual symbolism developed in 17th-century Dutch paintings. The colors and forms in Van Patten’s work frequently relate to the stereotypically feminine, which she subverts through disruption, referencing expressions of loss. The images do not find their final form after being photographed - they are cut, taped to the wall, rephotographed, and digitally transformed endlessly. Van Patten’s process embodies cycles of change: perpetually unfolding, and in a permanent state of suspense. Through these iterations, she both celebrates and questions relationships between the natural world and the artificial kingdom of kitsch.
