Athena

Sara VanDerBeek develops the principles of appropriation and re-photography that inspired the ‘Pictures Generation’ of the 1980s into something new, blurring the line between sculpture and photography in order to explore ideas about memory, transience and space. VanDerBeek’s prints document delicate assemblages of found objects, photographs and artworks that she puts together herself, careful considerations of space and the relationships generated by the counter-position of images. In photographing these constructions however, VanDerBeek distances the viewer and the object, transforming the assemblages into lost artefacts – now without physical reality – that survive only through the photographic record. Athena seems to reference Alexander Calder’s mobiles, with its collection of beads, feathers and photographs of classical sculpture deftly suspended from a sparse frame, but the construction also seems to recall ethnographic craftwork. There is something of the dreamcatcher about the beads and threads, giving the photographs hanging around them a somewhat magical aura: the photographs seem like memories made physical within the body of the structure. The photograph, however, freezes the construction as it stands, its intimations of movement and life suspended and suppressed, never to be realised – just as the photographs on the structure themselves eerily preserve their classical subjects. Athena is a compelling study in the way in which photography re-animates its subjects while keeping them locked them within an unreal half-life.