“For Walls,” a series of photographs by Art Honors candidate, Ivey Dahlstrom, will be exhibited in the Carlos Gallery from March 26 to April 3. A reception will be held Wednesday, April 3 at 5 p.m.
Compiled from day-to-day observations, Dahlstrom’s work explores growth, mortality, and memory through digital, silver gelatin, and platinum-palladium prints. Images of domestic scenes and day-to-day objects populate the work, forming the scaffolding around routine moments that are actually loaded with significance. This work invites us to be concerned about articles of familiarity. Sequenced in pairs of images and paced along the gallery wall in clusters, the exhibition generates a dialogue between photographs and with a suggested, but invisible, space.
“This work is about the tensions and collisions between how something looks versus how it feels,” says Dahlstrom, going on to suggest that regardless of what we share, such as our homes, memories and community, there is a part of us that is ultimately un-sharable and alone. “From this separation between what can and cannot be shared, arise contradictions. All aspects of existence are saturated in contradiction, but to ignore them, to ignore a fundamental part of what it is to be human, is to be blind.”
She symbolically equates blindness, in this context, with walls. Consequently, “For Walls” tries to understand the look and feel of how we intentionally blind ourselves, and build behavioral and emotional walls. Ultimately, the work proposes that we turn these walls into a home, within ourselves and amidst others, in order to survive.
In her final semester at the University of the South, Ivey B. Dahlstrom is completing her Bachelors of Art in sculpture and photography. An artist talk will be held Friday, April 26, in Convocation Hall at 9 a.m.