EXHIBITION DETAILS

In The Beginning: of Species

Exhibition Location
The Green Room
344 E. Mountain Ave, Fort Collins, CO 80524

STATEMENT

Alice Hargrave’s photographic and video works reflect on the notion of impermanence—of the natural environment, our personal experiences, the larger human condition, and photographic processes themselves. She is interested in how the fugitive color shifts of the photographic medium over time actually color our memory. Photographic mural-wallpapers, silk banners, videos, video projections, and sound installation are medias she has used to reimagine diverse ecosystems through the filters of time, emotion, memory, and environmental concerns. 

The Paradise Wavering photographs lead through tropical biospheres, mangroves, seascapes, riverscapes, ponds, prairies, and forests, placing the viewer into an intimate yet immersive experience of the organic world. The work is contemplative and constructed; searching for beauty,wonder, and the sublime in ever changing habitats while also alluding to an inevitable future of environmental insecurity, habitat loss, and species extinctions.

In Hargrave’s recent ongoing project Pink Noise / Last Calls; she has created photographic “portraits” of several endangered and threatened bird species from North America, as well as other countries. Using spectrograph depictions of the sound waves of actual bird calls, the marks are photographed, layered, and toned with hues found within the spectrum of each bird species. Reminiscent of hieroglyphics, this language of sound traces last calls in the wild, and in some cases are the only surviving calls of certain species. The palette comes from extracting the unexpected colors that one might not initially see upon looking at a particular bird. The amazing colors of eyes, talons, and skin, contradicts the ubiquitous argument “why save that simple brown bird”.

The Paradise Wavering landscapes are the empty grounds of a figure ground relationship between the threatened birds and the lands they used to occupy in abundance.  

In The Luxury of Night photographs Hargrave regards night as a space of almost unattainability. True night skies are often flooded with light pollution. Venturing outside in urban or rural landscapes puts us into a position of vulnerability in this 21st century culture of violence. Deeply moved upon learning of refugees from war torn regions of the world (Syria) relocated in Canada, and how these children had often never seen a night sky, moon, or stars; children were never allowed outside at night due to issues of safety, Hargrave felt an urgency to reconsider night in this new reality of our global culture. While also relishing in the beauty and sumptuousness of velvety night, Hargrave finds the sublime in the hours of the crepuscule; colors highlighted against dark skies are luminous, it becomes a privilege to be able to enter this world. Flora is magical, sensuous, and tempting during the fleeting moments of dusk turning into night which illustrates poignantly the unrelenting passage of time. 

Hargrave’s palette is inspired by early color photographic processes such as Autochromes andby the color shifts inherent to various photographic media which also delineate the passage of time. Photographic processes fade with their own distinctive patina, or color cast; aqua images from one decade or raw sienna from another, exist like relics of photographic paint pigments.Polaroids from the 1970’s fade to ochre yellow or green, and capturing images of a light polluted night harken back to these tones and have a similar sensibility to Fresson prints  (one of the earliest color processes from France). The color shifts themselves are sublime, and can literally color our memory.

Photography is the art of the fleeting, an attempt to catch hold of all things ephemeral —light, love, nature, time, happiness— however futile this attempt may be, we still try to grab hold of time, but time and memory are fickle. 

This quote from George Sand embodies my artistic practice. “The consciousness of self as animal, vegetable, and mineral and the delight we feel plunging down into that consciousness is by no means degrading-- It is good to know the fundamental life at our roots.”