By Josh Hughes
The upcoming exhibit at the VU Gallery, entitled “Animae Memoria,” features early 2000s renditions of classical pieces from the Greco-Roman world. Carolyn Krieg, the artist, generally starts her mixed media work with a chemical or digital photograph, yet from there the possibilities are endless. The process of her work itself intends to serve as a metaphor for the meaning of the work; she describes her art as having “fictional gain and generational loss.”
The show, which opens on Monday, April 3, will have an opening reception on Thursday, April 6, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., refreshments provided. “Animae Memoria” will then run until April 21, at which point the next VU Gallery exhibit will be put up.
Krieg’s work, which spans from 1999 up to the present, often focuses on the physicality of photography in which she manipulates the way that positive and negative photos are displayed and perceived. After starting with some sort of photographic process, Krieg may generate a Polaroid from a digital print and tear off the positive transparency, giving her the ability to draw and paint on the transparency in place of a traditional negative. Sometimes, however, she’ll start with a digital photograph printed on archival chromogenic paper, transfer the print onto a canvas, or some other similar object, to manipulate with resins and acrylics. This garners her work to fall under the conveniently obscure term “altered photography,” in which drastically different styles of pieces can exist alongside one another under the same categorization.
This is where Krieg’s self described “fictional gain and generational loss” comes in. Her work, whether it depicts bronze cast Roman statues or goats in a field, represents a metaphorical loss, or degradation in content, not unlike the haziness of a memory shrouded in a few, select details.
“I’m going for an iconic or archetypal image, with surroundings not a specific place but a kind of atmosphere,” Krieg says of her own work.
This can result in both an eeriness and a sense of mis-belonging to her work, though there’s an ever pervasive sense of intrigue with everything she does.
The exhibit will not feature new material, but a selection of her previous works, largely dating from the early 2000s when she first found an interest in Greco-Roman ideals (or rather making a postmodern commentary on these Greco-Roman ideals). Krieg’s work has been shown in the SAM, William Reagh Los Angeles Photography Center and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, and this collection of her work will feature some of her progress as an artist over the last decade and a half.