Thursday, August 5, 2010

Andrea Huerta Susan Harbage Page

Susan Harbage Page was born in 1959 in Greenville, Ohio and moved to North Carolina as a child. Her work is very much about the experience of growing up in the South. She works about gender, race, politics and illigal immigration. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Houston Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Isrel Museum. She received a Fulbright scholarship and teaches at the University of North Carolina. I am interested in her work because her photographs are haunting and deal with strong issues that are important to me.
The photograph that especially inspires me is from her Border Series. It is "Untitled (Striped Clothes) from 2008. It is set in a landscape in Brownsville Texas where Page has photographed objects left behind as illegal immigrants cross the Mexican American border. In this piece she photographed a stripped piece of clothing lying in the dirt in a desert like landscape. The landscape is out of focus because the objects are what are of interest to her. They seem to be like dead bodies lying on the ground. The feeling is sadness and isolation that one gets when viewing this and the other photographs from this series. Susan Harbage-Page's work inspires me because her work has powerful images that talk about current events in ways that may make us uncomforatable with images that have a disturbing beauty.

image under Gallery link, "(Untitled Striped Clothes)"
http://susanharbagepage.com
http://cgi.unc.edu/vhr/participants.php

No comments:

Post a Comment