David Maisel: Library of Dust

 

"Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patient from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families.

"The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit."

 

http://davidmaisel.com/default.asp

Lincoln Harrison

http://lincolnharrison.com/#/0

Diana Bloomfield

 

"For me, photographs are all about the past.  Even when I photograph to make a statement about the present, or to comment on the future, the image itself-- the one I've just made simply by opening and closing a shutter-- is cemented in the past.  When I look at photographs, no matter whose photographs they are, or when they are made, they inevitably conjure all sorts of memories for me.  When I look at old photographs of my family, or even of myself, I am staring at tangible memories, often barely recognizing those people in the pictures looking back at me.  And late at night, when I replay events that occurred earlier in my day, those events or conversations appear in my mind as a series of visual narratives, not all that clear or well-defined, and very much like half-remembered dreams."

 

 http://www.dhbloomfield.com/index.cfm

Ulrika Kestere: The Girl With 7 Horses

"Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fiercefull winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn't weigh much). The girl was devistated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes."

 

 http://ulrikakestere.com/