Home Revisited

I had the opportunity to speak with Susan Todd-Raque this past Wednesday about the show “Responding To Home” currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Todd-Raque curated the show and it was interesting to hear her inside perspective of how the show came together and her purpose behind it.

Susan Todd-Raque with a work by Karen Tauches

One of the curatorial decisions Todd- Raque explained to me was the placement of Karen Tauches’ large works on the wall opposing the entrance. Tauches’ works are ghostly photographs of homes imagined as disappearing in Atlanta’s great appetite for gentrification and leveling of buildings for something new. Being the first thing seen as the viewer enters the space, it sets the tone for a show dealing with the past and memories.

For me the house alludes to a ghost that seems to haunt many artists in the show. I learned from Todd-Raque that some of the photographers were documenting a home or town from childhood, a place they had since left for better or worse, and were now returning to, documenting their own reconciliation. Each photographer was grappling with their own loss, or the large divide, between childhood and adulthood.

While I still believe some photographers did a far more successful job than others in returning to these homes and capturing the loss of time, i.e. Joe Siegel’s work is amazing, this concept makes the overall show a very worthwhile venture into the possibilities the camera provides, and ways in which people use the camera, as a coping mechanism to deal with the passing of time.

The show is up at MOCAGA until Nov. 24th 2007. Check it out!

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Sentimental Snapshots