PENUMBRA Members Gallery | KATHERINE SIDELSKY
Katherine Sidelsky’s photographs are like building blocks, leading us through her active material study, where the photograph is a moment to linger on, perhaps, a significant realization. Or a question. Sidelsky’s images show off the beautiful translucence of tulle fabric. When there are shadows reflected on walls, it makes me keenly aware of the various planes she is capturing. A significant plane is her act of molding such a malleable material so that it spills through, folds into and is clawed within solid shapes to create compelling forms. In her pinhole images, tulle (made up of tiny little apertures), mitigates our view while it bends into clouds, sky and trees. These forms, these actions and tulle all seem to create a circumstance that teeters between stability and uncertainty. Tulle is a very resilient fabric that does not fray, and that also makes it an appropriate vessel to handle Sidelsky’s ongoing questioning and moments of self-realization.
-Hernease Davis
About Where is Here:
“…we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.” Douglas Crimp, 1979
An object becomes an image that becomes an object again. The relationship between image + object is more compelling to me than that of image + text. I make temporary constructions using one piece of tulle fabric to give form to my evolving sense of place. This “building” aims to create a photographic image to mark time, before the installation is dismantled and the fabric falls flat. I print the image to become an object once more, as a placeholder. Douglas Crimp described the continuing excavation of the past that occurs when experiencing an image in the present, as a “strata of representation.”
My transition from working in an office as an architect to a stay-at-home mother marked a monumental shift in my sense of place - not only in its physical realm but also in its social capacity. My focus narrowed as I navigated parenthood. Over time I found refuge with a camera, a piece of tulle fabric, and a black backdrop on the floor to reflect on a new sense of place, purpose, and identity.
When COVID-19 arrived, I continued to center this practice on my insulated relationship with home, family, and degrees of estrangement marked by six feet of separation. By the time the pandemic ended, I had become an empty-nester as our children grew and flew, and my identity shifted, once more. What happens when the roles we’ve grown into are no longer needed? I had expanded into space that no longer served a purpose, physically or spiritually. I began to incorporate new materials and experiment with a scanner and a simple pinhole camera to break away from my past control of light and focus.
These photographs are my placeholders, reflecting a period of growth that happens when one phase ends and another begins. Each is a temporary construct erected to describe a memory, a feeling, an emotion specific to the sense of place I felt at significant stages in my life. They mark memories that only resurfaced to announce themselves once I had an emptiness to fill. I’ve no longer restricted my practice to the space and materials I used in the past. Sometimes, emptiness is just what we need to move forward. I’ve developed a new relationship to place and identity, time and aging, and the realized priority to continue growing and challenging myself.
Artist Bio
Katherine Sidelsky is a visual artist whose work explores physical and perceptual boundaries and the emotional and sensory experiences therein. With a background in architecture, her work considers notions of place and memory through natural and alternative topographies. Katherine is currently an MFA Studio Arts student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has studied photography and alternative processes at the International Center of Photography, Penumbra Foundation, and Maine Media + College. Her images have been exhibited in group shows internationally, including The Exhibition Lab, Foley Gallery, New York; Unbound10!, Candela Gallery, Richmond, VA; and the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards at FotoNostrum, Barcelona. In 2010, Katherine joined a group of artists and architects organized by The Architectural League of New York to document the city's first decade of the 21st century. This effort was premised on Berenice Abbott's influential project about the city's dramatic transformation in Changing New York. The project culminated in a traveling exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010. Katherine's work was selected for articles in New York Magazine and The Architect's Newspaper. Katherine worked as a licensed architect in New York city after earning a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, and a postgraduate William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize. Before that, she worked as an architect in Los Angeles after graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Arizona. Katherine lives and works in New York's Lower Hudson Valley.
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