Restless Symmetries: Barbara Strigel and Kelda Van Patten

Barbara Strigel uses her urban/street photography to convey the sense of being “alone together” in urban life.  For the body of work entitled “We Were Neither Here nor There,” she comments: “There’s a certain gestalt in the balance of connection and separation that occurs in cities. We go about our business, sharing the sidewalk but lost in our own thoughts… For me, street photography and collage are both a search for unity. ”  Another set of her images is titled “If We Were to Talk about Architecture.”  Here, she comments: “In the shape of the city, there are instances when architecture becomes an entry point. The shadow of leaves on a blue wall becomes a recollection of summer, telephone wires sing jazz, and a repetition of square windows evoke a meditation. These fragmentary moments are resonant, sensory perceptions that invite connection to space.”

Her works are interpretations of the idea of the city, and as such often combine imagery of multiple cities. "These collages are not about specific locations. Instead, they explore the idea that a city is a perception, shaped by individual associations and experiences... It’s the idea of an analogous city, one that takes its shape from collective memory.  When I construct these collages, I work with fragments of my photographs. I layer them, positioning and arranging until something resonant begins to appear, and then I work to unify the pieces into an evocative familiar space.  I want my collages to remind the viewer of the way a place appears in recollection.” 

Kelda Van Patten's work references and subverts the classic still life, the domestic space, and concepts of kitsch. She states: “I seek to invoke a sense of surprise or contradiction through the consideration of photographs that occupy liminal spaces between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin. The subjects that I photograph are mined from the natural world and kitsch… For example, I think of artificial flowers, fruit, and plants as kitsch objects that attempt to mimic the blooming beauty of nature, while virtually eliminating the process of decay from the natural world… My printed photographs are often cut and taped to the wall and rephotographed. In that sense, my work embodies the natural cycles of change: perpetually unfolding, and in a permanent state of suspense.”

Van Patten considers kitsch in a broad sense and seeks to reference that world, rather than create images which are kitsch themselves.  Inspired by the poetry of Mary Ruefle, Van Patten’s images hold a deeper reflection on how we live. Ruefle’s writings on color deeply inform the work, and Van Patten’s titles often directly reference passages of her poetry, such as the following: “Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new strawberries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; it is the sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die. Green sadness weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it is the funeral silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk in joy.”