2012 was a year of profound personal dislocation. Amid tumultuous changes, I contrived many unconventional means to continue producing work. I was especially proud of the days spent escaping my hometown’s 110 degree summer in the Walker Art center’s air-conditioned Flat-Pak prefab house with one of the museum’s ipads, composing essays wirelessly in this infrequently-visited, ad hoc office. When assigned to cover Angela Bacon-Kidwell’s work, I knew that it reflected much of the grief and loss that I’d experienced that year. But it also re-affirmed the tenacity with which we must cling to the things that keep us hopeful. It was a pleasure, even under duress, to work with her. From a coming article:
“For centuries, people have created and kept Memento Mori, representations of death as reminders of their mortality. Photography made possible even more literal manners of this art, affording the bereaved a portrait of their loved ones before they passed eternally into memory. In a like way, Angela Bacon-Kidwell is at war with oblivion, although she aspires to retain and manage her emotional relationship to painful memories, and the ineluctable reality that loved ones depart…Her best works have an acquired poignancy, like smoothed stones that arrive on a beach, scoured of their incongruities yet indelibly marked by the agitation that formed them.”
full text: here
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