Paradise Wavering

Paradise Wavering is a photographic stream of consciousness that travels through a reservoir of memories. Alice Hargrave explores experiences that reflect on the passage of time and seeks the sublime in moments on the periphery of daily life. By interspersing the work she currently makes with re-photographed vintage source material from her own family archive of 8mm films and snapshots, she melds together past and present, and alludes to an uncertain future where environmental angst pervades. The resulting curvilinear narrative is fractured, frayed, and stained in color, as are our memories and photographic substrates themselves.

Leading through prairies, mangroves and tropical forests, the photographs are inspired by the heroic landscapes of early travel photography, vernacular family pictures, and the first color processes such as Autochromes. They embrace, but also re-contextualize, and reimagine the clichés of documenting family travels where photography’s role is to harness exotic flora and fauna or "Kodachrome" moments from a moving car, her liberal and intuitive use of the vivid, visceral colors of recollection eclipses reality, inscribes emotion, and reveals how photographs literally color memory and perception. Color itself becomes a subject, leaving behind its mood and patina as a shroud.

In addition to Hargrave's photographs, Paradise Wavering also features an essay by Allison Grant, an interview by Kendra Paitz, and two excerpts from Rebecca Solnit's seminal book Field Guide to Getting Lost.

 

Alice Q. Hargrave is a photographic artist and educator, based in Chicago. Her work explores the fugitive nature of experience, time, light and the photographic medium itself, and how photographs literally color memory and perception Hargrave has had several one-person and group exhibitions, including two one-person shows at The Chicago Cultural Center. She exhibits and is collected nationally and internationally; her work is included in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Ruttenberg Collection, Nuveen Corporation, Outer Circle Corporation, and Rush Presbyterian Hospital among others. Her work has been seen at Yale University Art Gallery, The Smart Museum of Art (Chicago, Ill.), The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Tweed Museum of Art, Art Metz (France), Klein Gallery, and Carol Ehlers Gallery, which represented her. Hargrave has received many awards for her work, and has been published and reviewed in several journals. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, where she has taught both full time and part time since 1994.

Allison Grant is a Chicago based curator, writer, and artist. Currently, she serves as assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where she has worked since 2008. Grant holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Media Studies. She teaches in the Photography and Art & Design departments at Columbia College Chicago.

Sandra Binion is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago.  In addition to her own career as an artist, she curates exhibitions for Experimental Sound Studio's Audible Gallery.  For each of these, she composes a poem in lieu of a curatorial statement in order to reflect on the aesthetic and emotional core of the artists whose work she has selected.

Kendra Paitz is Senior Curator at University Galleries of Illinois State University, where she has been since 2008. She is also the founding Director at Violet Poe Projects, an independent artist-project space. She has organized solo exhibitions featuring Juan Angel Chávez, Laura Letinsky, Melanie Schiff, Jason Lazarus (co-curated), Stanya Kahn, Carrie Schneider, Kendell Carter, Stephanie Brooks, Oliver Herring (co-curated), Irena Knezevic, Bob Jones, Schuyler Maehl,Adam Farcus, and Shinique Smith, among others. Her group exhibitions include The House of the Seven Gables, Orison