Susan Morelock

Ithaca (from Blue)
pigment print
30 x 20 in.

Compelled at once by beauty and theory, my works take form in an imagined space found somewhere in between the archaeologist’s excavation site, the librarian’s personal shelves, and the systematic mythologies unraveled in the studio. I use photography to construct poetic conflations, to exploit light and space, and to celebrate slow looking. I work to juxtapose the technological with the artistic, the topical with the historic, the vernacular with the institutional canon, and acts of ritual with the rigors of research. Although I work in discrete series, my practice is such that I photograph on a continuum: adjacent picture constellations grow in the studio gradually, then solidify in decisive cartographic furies.

Blue – Blue is an experiment in ritual and collection. Photographing, like writing, is an act of conjuring, inciting and essaying. The project began with a pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Massachusetts and has since wrestled with the inadequacies of description, memory and knowing. Softly gathering around the tension between expectation and reality, Blue depicts the days passed between June and September.

© Susan Morelock