structuring absence

Exhibition by Tabitha Soren

Artist Talk: October 6 @ 6pm

Exhibition: October 6 – December 22, First Fridays 5-10pm and by appointment

Local Language: 477 25th Street, Oakland CA 94612

View: @locallanguageart

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Tabitha Soren explores the expansive power of photography by pushing its material limits and embracing its unreliable nature. She probes the surface of the photograph to unlock the rich history of the medium and experiments with sculptural and painterly interventions to further complicate the inherent uncertainty of the source. This layered approach underscores not only the bounds of the viewer’s perception but also makes visible the psychological states of Soren’s subject matter, creating a tension between what is seen and what lies underneath.

At Local Language, Soren explored the material opportunities and challenges of printing on unique surfaces, from metal mesh to bedsheets. The expectation of photography to capture a specific moment in time is blurred in both the Structuring Absence and Motherload series. Interfering with the way viewers absorb her work via layered mesh and visible stretcher bars, Structuring Absence requires a viewer to slow down and contemplate a quiet, intimate moment. Motherload intentionally mars the visual field with an accumulated experience (thousands of layered images captured over time), which questions what in our lives impairs our ability to really see.

Tabitha Soren’s The Mind-Baby Problem is a new series of five self-portraits of the artist as a nursing mother, printed on coated cotton bedsheets, hung in the manner of a laundry line, whose palette follows the day from dawn to dusk. Each work, which is at once crisply photographic and gracefully sculptural, makes public the intimate dyad of mother and child, which is the root of our highly social species. At a time when artificial intelligence and global political regression pose the question “what does it mean to be human?” Soren’s series answers with images of the sleep deprivation, emotional turbulence and physically draining rollercoaster that is unconditional love.Using a suspended camera to capture the aerial view of an infant’s first three months of life, these images and video are a multi-layered, visual compendium. The project is not meant to capture a singular moment of care or tenderness, but instead aims to share the blur of cumulative, almost unregistered days of hazy, repetitive gestures of newborn parenting life.

Motherload is another example of Soren’s interest in impediments to the humanistic encounter. She intentionally mars the visual field with an accumulated experience, which questions what in our lives impairs our ability to really see.

ARTIST’S BIO

A visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five years, Soren has long explored the intersection of psychology, culture, politics, and the body. Her mediated images examine the vulnerabilities we all carry and provide the outline for a narrative still endlessly unfolding. Whether capturing solitary individuals running through empty streets, harnessing the sublime power of the natural world, or obscuring violent scenes with a dense application of ink and resin, Soren calls forth the underlying and pervasive energy that propels a twist of fate, upends a story, and challenges a belief. She never lets the viewer forget that there is something looming just outside of the frame- maybe a threat, a dashed hope, an unfair assumption, or an impending change in fortune- that deserves respect and consideration.  

Though a palpable sense of pathos connects all her images, Soren begins each new series using the methodical investigative tools she used during her time in journalism. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to the cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation. This constant navigation of environments hinged on threat and survival led to a true understanding of what it means to always live on high alert, giving Soren a level of empathy for internal struggle and a sincere desire to show the myriad ways we reveal ourselves as we move through the world.

Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas and lived in 7 U.S. states, Germany and the Philippines during her formative and adolescent years.  She received her degree in 1989 from New York University and was awarded a fellowship from Stanford University in 1997.  Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Transformer Station, Cleveland, OH; The Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN. Select group exhibitions include ICA LA, SF MOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art, MassArt Museum, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; The Worcester Art Museum, MA; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Aperture Gallery, New York, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK; and the Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.

Soren’s work is in many private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; the Oakland Museum of California; The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her images have been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Garage, Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, California Sunday Magazine, ArtNews, Newsweek, and the Guardian, and publications include Fantasy Life (Aperture), Trace (Yoffy Press) and Surface Tension (RVB Books). She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Local Language is an Oakland-based creative studio that curates and creates custom artworks and large scale installations.  We are visual artists, art consultants, designers, and extraordinary makers – and the art collections we create tell the story of each community and location. We work with a network of independent artists in the Bay Area and beyond, placing local artists’ work in every project. Inside our studio art fabricators utilize high-tech digital tools and artisan craft techniques to print, paint, build, and create art. We create art collections for corporate, hospitality, healthcare, and residential environments around the world. Made in Oakland.

Our artist in residence and exhibitions program offers local artists space, expertise, and access to our digital technology and artisan craft expertise. Each artist works with our technicians to pursue their personal art practice utilizing experimental digital techniques and fabrication methods; culminating in solo exhibitions.