About The Artist

Alice Hargrave is a photographic artist, and educator. Her work explores the fugitive nature of experience, time, light, and the photographic medium itself, and how photographs literally color memory, and perception. The photographs depict moods, memory, landscapes, interiors, or objects, that are just on the periphery of the whirling dervish of daily life. 

Hargrave has exhibited widely, is represented in several collections including The Museum of Contemporary Photography and The Ruttenberg Collection. Her work has been seen at Yale University Art Gallery, The Smart Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Tweed Museum of Art, Art Metz (France), and Carol Ehlers Gallery, who represented her. She has received many awards, has been published and reviewed in several journals, and is an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago where she held a tenure track full time position before deciding to teach part time. Hargrave has taught photography since 1994.

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PARADISE WAVERING 

 

The Paradise Wavering photographs reference and are inspired by the heroic landscapes of 19th century photography, and painting. 

The photographs lead through mangroves and other tropical biospheres immersing the viewer into a sumptuous experience of the natural world, 

while also alluding to an uncertain future where a subtext of environmental angst pervades. 

I am delving into this organic world with concerns for its very survival, while simultaneously seeking inherent beauty and the sublime. 

 

Nature’s dichotomy of being at once vulnerable and a ferocious unrelenting force is represented through skies rarely blue, lulls before storms, 

and cloud formations newly unfamiliar in their ominous otherworldly twenty-first century forms. 

Paradise is in flux, tenuous, and like memory elusive. 

The photographs represent experiences, and memories that reflect on the passage of time, and the fragility of life. 

 

Color is a very important aspect of my working process. I experiment, and work very liberally  with color, adding layers of tone much like I did in the analog color darkroom or when steeping images into subsequent toner baths. My colors are often inspired by early color processes, such as Autochromes, or by the color shifts in various photographic media as they are markers for and trace the passage of time. Many photographic processes have their own particular time, and fade with their own distinctive patina. Each decade can have its own color cast: the aqua decade or raw sienna decade. I think of these like paint pigments. I love the way that certain substrates from the 1970s, for example, like Polaroids, fade to that ochre yellow or green. 

The color shifts themselves are sublime.

 

I am interested in the parallels between fugitive image, fugitive nature, and fugitive memory. 

Photography is the art of the fleeting - an attempt to catch hold of all things ephemeral -

light, love, childhood, nature, time ... However futile this attempt may be, we still try to grab hold of time, but time and memory are fickle.

 

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