DIANE MEYER / Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten

May 25 – September 23, 2016

I am interested in the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs transform history into nostalgic objects that obscure understandings of the past.

Header image: New Jersey I, Diane Meyer

In series Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten, cross stitch embroidery has been sewn directly into family photographs. The images are broken down and reformed through the embroidery into a hand-sewn pixel structure. As areas of the image are concealed by the embroidery, small, seemingly trivial details emerge while the larger picture and context are erased. I am interested in the disjunct between actual experience and photographic representation and photography’s ability to supplant memory. By borrowing the visual language of digital imaging with an analog process, a connection is made between forgetting and digital file corruption. The tactility of the pieces also references the growing trend of photos remaining primarily digital- stored on cell phones and hard drives, but rarely printed out into a tangible object.

About the Artist

Diane Meyer received a BFA in Photography from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in 1999 and an MFA in Visual Arts from The University of California, San Diego in 2002. She has been living in Los Angeles since 2005 where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

She has received grants from METRO Los Angeles, The City of Santa Monica Department of Cultural Affairs, The California Council for the Humanities California Stories Fund and the Durfee Foundation. She has been an artist in residence at Takt, Berlin; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Residency in the Woolworth Building.

Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester; the 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica; AIR Gallery, NYC and The Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City;  SPARC, South Pasadena; as well as numerous group shows in the United States and abroad including the Robert Mann Gallery, NYC; Regina Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna, Austria; Klompching Gallery, NYC; The Brattleboro Museum of Art, VT; ABC Treehouse, Amsterdam; Fototropia, Guatemala City; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Field Projects, NYC; China House, Penang, Malaysia; Galerie Huit, Arles, France; Project 42, Alkmaar, The Netherlands;  The Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY; The Helsinki Biennale, Finland; CUE Art Foundation, NYC; NEXT Art Fair, Chicago; Field Projects, New York; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins; The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; The Seaport Cultural Center, NYC; Cuchifritos Gallery, NYC; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, NYC; Lennox Contemporary, Toronto; Rotunda Gallery, NYC; Jen Bekman Gallery, NYC; Spaces Gallery, Cleveland; Jessica Murray Projects, NYC; Arthouse, Austin; and the Holter Museum of Art, Helena. dianemeyer.net