Rebecca Diederichs | artist statement

Anne Carson has written in The Autobiography of Red: “Photography is disturbing [...] Photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships. [...] But you don’t need a camera to tell you that. What about stars?” (Carson 65). What can we do about the complexity of describing the peculiarities and accident of lived experience? Rather than building an accurate representation of a haptic experience, I am intrigued by the possibilities for active present-ness of that moment through a viewer’s perceptual response to the juxtaposition and placement of photographs, of text(s). In recent projects, including Meeting Loraine (2008) and Telling of Green (2010), photographic images were brought together to compose a kind of narrative or telling to describe a moment of being present. Exploring the desire for ‘experience inscribed,’ these projects began as studies of written text, in artworks and in books about seeing and holding fast to images. The final artworks became evidence of a progression of considering image as text. Writing, drawing, painting, and photography all became aspects of this textual expression. In their finished manifestations in my work these all become subject to the perceptual idiosyncrasies of the photographic plane.

Rebecca Diederichs