Tabitha Soren - Violet Grey
Courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Artists Rights Society
Surface Tension isolates one of the most intimate layers of our daily experience: the place where our warm animal bodies, our simplest instincts, collide with the cold and infinite knowledge of the technological world.
Surface Tension is shot with an 8 x10 inch film inside a view camera. A raking side light illuminates the greasy smears that remain on an iPad after constant interaction. The intersection of the analogue negative with the digital source material puts into sharp focus the grime, fingerprints and smudges we typically try to look past and ignore. The pictures underneath these traces are appropriated images- almost always disseminated, shared and received without being sought out- raising questions of authorship and authenticity surrounding this ubiquitous mode of visual communication.
These photos speak of the startling and uncanny continual interaction between our skin, itself a screen for complex fleshly machinery, and the phone, which masks a world of machinery that was built with the express purpose of more efficiently monetizing everything that our flesh (and mind, and soul) might desire. These two systems, animal and machine, meet on this glassy surface; the marks left behind are the only physical record of this meeting, and the marks have become near-invisible to us, in part because they’re on the eye’s surface, and are thus one of the few parts of daily experience that the eye can’t easily record.
Surface Tension is a wordless evocation of the way care fights distance in our everyday lives.
Tabitha Soren explores the expansive power of photography by pushing its material limits and embracing its unreliable nature. She probes the surface of the photograph to unlock the rich history of the medium and experiments with sculptural and painterly interventions to further complicate the inherent uncertainty of the source. This layered approach underscores not only the bounds of the viewer’s perception but also makes visible the psychological states of Soren’s subject matter, creating a tension between what is seen and what lies underneath. Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas and lived in 7 U.S. states, Germany and the Philippines during her formative and adolescent years. She received her degree in 1989 from New York University and was awarded a fellowship from Stanford University in 1997. Exhibitions include SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Aperture Gallery, New York, NY; The Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; MAC, Birmingham; Millennium Gallery, Sheffield; DCA Dundee, Scotland and the ArkDes Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
Soren’s work is in many private and 22 public collections in the United States, including the National Gallery in Washington DC and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Artists Rights Society
Surface Tension isolates one of the most intimate layers of our daily experience: the place where our warm animal bodies, our simplest instincts, collide with the cold and infinite knowledge of the technological world.
Surface Tension is shot with an 8 x10 inch film inside a view camera. A raking side light illuminates the greasy smears that remain on an iPad after constant interaction. The intersection of the analogue negative with the digital source material puts into sharp focus the grime, fingerprints and smudges we typically try to look past and ignore. The pictures underneath these traces are appropriated images- almost always disseminated, shared and received without being sought out- raising questions of authorship and authenticity surrounding this ubiquitous mode of visual communication.
These photos speak of the startling and uncanny continual interaction between our skin, itself a screen for complex fleshly machinery, and the phone, which masks a world of machinery that was built with the express purpose of more efficiently monetizing everything that our flesh (and mind, and soul) might desire. These two systems, animal and machine, meet on this glassy surface; the marks left behind are the only physical record of this meeting, and the marks have become near-invisible to us, in part because they’re on the eye’s surface, and are thus one of the few parts of daily experience that the eye can’t easily record.
Surface Tension is a wordless evocation of the way care fights distance in our everyday lives.
Tabitha Soren explores the expansive power of photography by pushing its material limits and embracing its unreliable nature. She probes the surface of the photograph to unlock the rich history of the medium and experiments with sculptural and painterly interventions to further complicate the inherent uncertainty of the source. This layered approach underscores not only the bounds of the viewer’s perception but also makes visible the psychological states of Soren’s subject matter, creating a tension between what is seen and what lies underneath. Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas and lived in 7 U.S. states, Germany and the Philippines during her formative and adolescent years. She received her degree in 1989 from New York University and was awarded a fellowship from Stanford University in 1997. Exhibitions include SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Aperture Gallery, New York, NY; The Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; MAC, Birmingham; Millennium Gallery, Sheffield; DCA Dundee, Scotland and the ArkDes Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.
Soren’s work is in many private and 22 public collections in the United States, including the National Gallery in Washington DC and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.