23 - Katie Hargrave & Meredith Lynn—Driving Ideas on Public Space and the American Landscape / March 25, 2019 by Vivian Liddell

Meredith Lynn on collaboration:

Actually something that I really appreciate about working with Katie is that—seeing her work through ideas and problems in her own work and knowing that when she calls me and says “I think that you need to reexamine this idea”—knowing that she is also pushing herself through those same challenging and difficult conversations in her own work and then knowing that I can be open and vulnerable to those criticisms that she’s bringing to me because I know that she’s also bringing that to her own work. I think that’s something that we all need to strive for… is to be willing to have your mind changed. Not about everything certainly— I think we have to have certain ethics and ideas that we hold fast to—but being willing to put up any of your ideas to scrutiny, I think is really important.

19 - Jenny Fine—Exploring White Identity in the Rural South through Photography and Performance / October 15, 2018 by Vivian Liddell

Jenny Fine on her photographic series “The Saddest Day”:

They had invested all of their savings in becoming farmers…They had gotten a load of, I think they call them guilts… from some farmer…One of those pigs were sick and so it introduced …dysentery into all the pigs and they had to all be slaughtered on the same day …Basically it devastated my family. And so I was really interested in that narrative of my father and my uncle as young people having to slaughter 100 pigs or whatever all in the same day.

And that they often referred to that story as the saddest day. And so, we went to the farm to really kind of reenact that and that was just sort of the narrative I wanted to reenact. I wasn’t really sure what was gonna happen because I knew that no matter what you do— this performance for the camera— no matter how much you prepare, that you’re always at the mercy of the moment.

And I was using my twin lens Mamiya camera— which you don’t look straight forward. You actually look down into the camera. And so I wasn’t actually facing this narrative —my family— straight on. We were in the landscape of the farm and I’m looking through this square viewfinder straight down. The landscape in a way became the stage. And as they were moving in and out of the frame they were coming on and off stage. And It became really this theatrical reenactment or attempt to reenact the saddest day.