Houston-based
artist Amy Blakemore takes photographs in order to explo
re the ways in which memory both records
and transforms visual information. Employing the camera as subjective tool,
Blakemore has compared the activity of photography to the process of gathering
broken bits and lost objects discovered serendipitously during long walks.
"Instead of picking up stuff," she states, "I leave with a flat, squared-off
record of things and people in space."
Amy Blakemore: Photographs
1988-2008, on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, from
May 5 - July 10, 2011, surveys Blakemore's mature career with a carefully
distilled selection of 36 works, ranging from early black-and-white street
photographs to her lushly colored portraits and landscapes. "There is an
alluring, haunting, presence in Amy Blakemore's photographs; a combined sense
of immediacy and distance that is persistent and paradoxically transitory,"
said Glen Gentele, OKCMOA president and CEO. "It is a great pleasure to present
this illuminating exhibition of her work at the Oklahoma City Museum of
Art."
Blakemore was originally trained in documentary traditions. In the mid
1980s, she embraced the highly idiosyncratic Diana camera, black-and-white
film, and the informal format and compositions of snap-shot photographs. At
the same time, however, she brought to her practice a rigorous sense of
composition and masterful printing techniques, drawing a nuanced range of tones
and an exceptional degree of resolution from her negatives. In the mid 1990s,
she made the transition to color work through a series of highly abstract
landscapes, incorporating elements of the land, sea, and sky. By the end of the
decade, a series of family portraits and views of her native Tulsa introduced a
new element of intimacy into her work. Blakemore's most recent photographs
concentrate again on the figure-whether randomly captured or formally
posed.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1958, Blakemore received dual undergraduate
degrees in psychology and art from Drury College (now Drury University),
Springfield, Missouri, and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas
at Austin, where she graduated in 1985. She spent the next two years as an
artist-in-residence in the MFAH's celebrated Core Program and joined the
faculty of the museum's Glassell School of Art in 1986. Recently the focus of
solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery, Houston, and the Pingyao International
Photography Festival, Blakemore was also featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial,
Day for Night, and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston's Nexus/Texas in
2007.
A fully illustrated catalogue, titled Amy Blakemore: Photographs
1988-2008 , accompanies this exhibition. The book
includes essays by Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH curator of art and special
projects; Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of
Photography at the MFAH; Chrissie Iles, curator, the Whitney Museum of American
Art; and Marisa Sánchez, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Seattle
Art Museum.
Amy Blakemore: Photographs
1988-2008 has been organized by the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston.
