CAROLLE BÉNITAH
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to announce “The farther I remember,” a group exhibition showcasing the work of acclaimed emerging and established photographers Carolle Bénitah, Eeva Hannula, Susanne Wellm, and Robin Cracknell. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, December 10, 2-6pm. A book signing of Carolle Bénitah’s debut photo book, “Photos Souvenirs,” published earlier this year by Kehrer Verlag, will also be held on Sat. Dec. 10, 3:30pm.
“The farther I remember” highlights each photographer’s unique relationship to memory and time. In the collected works on view, the artists have mined their past, dreams, and subconsciouses to create images that are at once familiar and new using various techniques and crafts that include the layering of images, direct physical contact with the photograph, and analog and digital methods of reworking the negative or original image.
In her three-part series Photos-Souvenirs, French Moroccan photographer Carolle Bénitah performs a kind of exorcism of inner demons and past repressions through the act of embroidery on old family snapshots. Eeva Hannula also mines the depth of the inner world through her focus on Freud’s concept of the uncanny. In her ongoing series The Structure of Uncertainty, Hannula combines staged photography and material from her personal archive, covering and hiding parts of the images as a metaphor for repressed or incomprehensible experiences and perceptions. In Inner Landscapes, Susanne Wellm turns her attention to the everyday world through open narrative visuals made with personal, found and historic archive materials, painting, drawing, Polaroids and film still photography. Robin Cracknell’s portraits of his son, shot with found, sometimes damaged cameras and salvaged 35mm cine film and created using an exerimental printing process that may include dust, hair, and bleach, recall the heady, dreamy haze we remember youth by as adults.
Carolle Bénitah, who worked for ten years as a fashion designer before turning to photography in 2001, incorporates the art of sewing and beading into her photographs. Her work is part of notable public and private art collections, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Sunnhordland Museum (Bergen, Norway), Centro Fotográfico Álvarez Bravo (Oaxaca, Mexico), and the collections of Marin Karmitz (Paris), Sir Mark Fhers Haukhol (Houston), Jacques and Galila Hollander (Brussels), and Jan de Bont (Los Angeles). Carolle Bénitah was born in Casablanca (Morocco) and graduated from the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (Paris). Her series Photos-Souvenirs was selected to exhibit in FotoFest’s 2014 Discoveries of the Meeting Place showcase of past Biennial portfolio reviews.
Robin Cracknell, born in India and raised in America, moved to London in 1987, where he began collecting discarded film cuttings from the projection booth of the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. These found film cuttings would later serve as the new “emulsion” for Cracknell’s photographic work, which has appeared on several magazine covers and over 300 book jackets. His ongoing series Childhood was included in the top ten of over 12,000 artists’ works on Saatchi Art, and was selected for a show curated by readers of The Guardian as well as noted gallerists, critics and artists. His work has since been exhibited internationally, and can be found in the collections of The National Portrait Gallery and The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and Fundacion Privada Sorigue (Spain). Images from Childhood were published in Thames and Hudson’s “Family Photography Now” in Spring 2016, and a selection of the artist’s notebooks illustrating the process and concept behind the series were also featured in the acclaimed 2014 Thames and Hudson publication, “Photographers’ Sketchbooks.”
Eeva Hannula, b. 1983, is an emerging photographer currently studying for her MA in photography at Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. She explores psychoanalytical method and the concept of Freud’s uncanny in her series The Structure of Uncertainty, selections of which have appeared in group shows at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Les Rencontres d’Arles (Paris), Fellehus Nordic Embassies (Berlin), and alongside the work of fellow Scandinavian photographer Susanne Wellm in Sous Les Etoiles Gallery’s 2015 show “Not above a whisper,” among others. In 2013, she was awarded a grant from the Arts Council of Finland and selected as part of Foam Magazine’s Talent Issue.
Susanne Wellm, b. 1965, is originally a printmaker, educated at the Danish School of Arts and Crafts at the Institute for Unica. She lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work includes various photographic techniques, such as Polaroid, Super 8 film, digital photography and collage. She has exhibited broadly in Denmark, Japan, China, Finland, and the US, including solo shows at Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR) and The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen. She is represented in several public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Portland Art Museum (OR), Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Japan) and Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (Austin, TX). Her series Inner Landscapes was published into a photo book by Kehrer Verlag.
