FotoFest Biennial 2020 | Women of Wonder

KATHRYN DUNLEVIE: "WOMEN OF WONDER" | ARTIST STATEMENT: Inspired by today’s hyper-abundance of visual information, I am treating imagery from disparate sources as transmutable raw material. Intermixing my own photographs with elements from popular as well as historical sources conjures up unsettling entities and strange scenarios. Relics from our communal pictorial archive are commingled with contemporary images, creating jumps through space and time and echoing the startling juxtapositions of contemporary visual culture. The characters that emerge from this process find themselves in locales ranging from Italy's Fiumicino in ‘Touching Down' to Turkey's western Aegean coast in 'Hitchhiker's Guide to Kusadasi' - and in times ranging from WWI in ‘Escape From the Lab’ to the 1930’s in 'Marlowe’s Mistake’. 'Ostara’ and ‘Khidr’ harken back to ancient eras, while ‘Dr. Who’s Girlfriend’ has arrived from outside of time. ‘Our Lady of the Harbor’ has escaped pre-disaster Pompeii on a mission to contemporary Los Angeles, while the denizen of ‘Tipping Point’ floats above it all in a tent that has no floor, and apparently no gravity. As diverse images converge and give rise to outlandish creatures and enigmatic situations, the "Women of Wonder" inspire us to go unabashedly wherever we choose and to do whatever we like.