Borrowed People | Constructed Places, on view through March 23 at the UM Wynwood Project Space, explores the creation of identity through the use of appropriated familial and found imagery. Anne Leighton Massoni, Libby Rowe, and Kris Sanford each create new stories from found photographs, taking something discarded and nearly lost and creating story anew. Rooted in photographic processes, their work takes form in both 2D and 3D pieces.
With her Holding series, Anne Leighton Massoni utilizes created images and found photographs to present a place between truth and fiction. These contrasting images sit side by side with a thin line painted across their surface, drawing imagined connections. The artist combines photographs of empty spaces (once inhabited or currently inhabited, but with no one present) with found photographs of times that no longer exist (images that are empty of personal memory). Appropriated images are stripped of their tone and cropped, but nothing else in the image (scratches, imperfections, contrast, etc.) is disturbed, whereas the “space” images are adjusted as darkroom prints would be.
In (sub)Division, Libby Rowe seeks to create a societal identity through the exploration of the preconceived and perceived intimacy of “the neighborhood” in comparison to the reality of experience lived within planned communities. These fabricated neighborhoods are ideally fashioned to create community, but in practice separate residents with walls from the outside world of imagined security threats. Inside the walls, residents relate to their neighbors through a series of well-manicured facades. While in reality they are further separated by fences erected for privacy and streets arranged in rat-like mazes that end in cul-de-sacs, made to create intimacy between those families who are part of the sacred circles. (sub)Division is an installation of found imagery built into three-dimensional house structures arranged in a double-ended cul-de-sac.
In Kris Sanford’s Between the Lines, a 1954 diary from a grandfather she never met serves as the inspiration and background for many of the photographs. The figures that emerge from the pages, taken from found photographs, represent the memories contained in the text. The photographs and diaries are personal and detailed, yet hopelessly incomplete at telling the whole story. Shallow focus reveals small details while obscuring the larger story. The individuals pictured serve as characters in a search to uncover lost stories of life, family, and love.
Artist bios:
Anne Leighton Massoni is a specialist professor of photography at Monmouth University in New Jersey. She holds a M.F.A. in photography from Ohio University and a B.A. in photography and anthropology from Connecticut College. Her work relates to both real and fabricated memories.
Libby Rowe holds an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and a B.F.A. from the University of Northern Iowa. Her work addresses issues of identity and belonging. Rowe is an assistant professor and the head of photography at University of Texas, San Antonio.
Originally from southeast Michigan, Kris Sanford lives in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. She received her M.F.A. in photography from Arizona State University in 2005. Sanford has exhibited work nationally and received a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum in 2010. She is a lecturer at Central Michigan University.
