Amanda Keller Konya
Specimens From America's Most Polluted River
Common modes of conveying information, such as science and journalism, fail to represent the complex reality of the New River, which flows north from Mexico into California — its use by illegal immigrants as a crossing point, its toxic state, the way it marks the boundary between public and private space. I was especially moved to undertake this project when I learned that the river, containing DDT, PCBs, and other dangerous chemicals, runs through California’s Imperial Valley, adjacent to crops grown and eaten every day by Americans nationwide. Illegal immigrants have direct contact with this chemical stew, and Border Patrol agents, as a matter of policy, won’t enter the water.
I produced the image component of this project at different access points to the river, collecting water samples along the way. Each image is enclosed in a specimen bottle and suspended in river water taken from the corresponding site. I labeled the bottles with traditional specimen tags, which record thoughts and experiences from police officers, Border Patrol agents, immigrants, hunters, activists, and community leaders. To play with ideas of image construction, I built a reversal of the photographic experience into the work: the viewer looks through the river water to see the photograph, whereas one typically would look at the photograph to see the river.
Tobia Makover
Tobia Makover
Thinking About Photography
Dedicated to expanding our ideas about photography
Meridel Rubenstein
©Meridel Rubenstein, Oppenheimer's Chair
Oppenheimer's Chair
Oppenheimer’s Chair was a commission for the first SITE Santa Fe International Biennial which intentionally opened on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic test at Trinity. This room-size glass house, with sandblasted imagery and a video projection onto a glass chair, is a meditation on nature and the shedding of defensive postures after 50 years of the Cold War. An armored sentry figure, made of transparent film in a standing steel frame, guards the portal. The chair video can be seen through him, transmutating in his solar plexus.
©Meridel Rubenstein, Oppenheimers Chair with Armor
Photography is how I best convert my ideas materially. Everything comes in the eye just like a camera lens and is upside down and backwards. I've always felt my job is to turn things right side up. I do see things like tonalities and sharpness in a very 19th century way. But I have done everything I can to break down that distancing that happens when photographic images are faraway on a wall with a cold gelatin surface instead of enveloping the viewer. So now I just say I’m an artist using photography, not very traditionally.
©Meridel Rubenstein, Poison Nectar
©Meridel Rubenstein, Ghost House Snake's skin
©Meridel Rubenstein, Ghost House with Chain Mail
©Meridel Rubenstein, Oppenheimer's Chair Video and Text