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Artist Statement:
My photography explores themes
of "place" (as a repository of
memory and symbol, and as a
cultural artifact), the
passage of time, looking at
the forbidden and forgotten.
I've searched out sites that
touch the deeper emotions –
places that are hard to look
at, or where those in charge
...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
Solo Exhibitions
2002
Fotogalerie Lichtzone,
Groningen, Netherlands
Galerie De Opsteker,
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Fotogalerie Objektief,
Enschede, Netherlands
Truckee Meadows Community
College, Reno, NV
2001
University of Nevada, Reno, NV
University of California
Berkeley Extension, San
Francisco, CA
2000
McHenry Co. College, Crystal
Lake, IL
University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, TN
Rogue Community ...
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Artist Galleries:
Photo-eye Gallery,
Photographer's Showcase
www.photoeye.com/gallery
...
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Collections:
Griffin Museum of Photography,
Winchester, MA
Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam,
Netherlands
Jane Fudge, Portland, OR...
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Corrie Mccluskey:
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Express (Berkeley, CA)
"OverThere: A critical guide to San Francisco Events/Visual Arts"
February 2, 2001
The deserted ruins of Alcatraz are silent in Corrie McCluskey's black-and-white photographs. Gone are the weekend crowds, the sound of clanging bars on the audiotape tour, the anecdotes of famous prisoners and daring escape attempts. In their place, the artist shows us one empty room after another, many in buildings that are ordinarily off-limits to the public, such as the narrow alleys beneath Building 64 or the insides of the military-barracks-turned-guards'-quarters. The show includes only a portion of her photographic output of the last few years, but it touches on all three of Alcatraz's recent histories: military garrison, federal penitentiary, and occupied island.
McCluskey sees Alcatraz as a place full of textures: peeling paint, rust bubbles, rotting wood. It is also a place where one's ordinary sense of scale goes a little off-kilter. the cells are tiny, but the halls and ceilings look almost cavernous, and the prison recreation yard seems impossibly huge.
Her photographs also capture a palpable ghostly presence in each space she visits. It's a subtle feeling of life - or rather the residue of past life. There's a sense of time slowed down, but not completely arrested. The shadows on the recreation yard wall look like they might start to move with the sun if we watched long enough. And in "Birdman" Robert Stroud's cell, or the hospital's hydrotherapy room, sunlight shines through the dirty, barred windows and glints feebly off the tiled floor, creating an effect that seems alive with an intangible presence, almost like an empty chapel illumintated by muted light from a stained-glass window.
But McCluskey is certainly not trying to prettify Alcatraz, or to make a case that being a prisoner there was like sitting in church. She's clearly haunted not only by the mental and physical anguish of incarceration, but also by the boredom. The toilets, bare cement walls, and barred windows that populate her pictures all have an unrelenting institutional sameness, vividly evoking the numbing monotony of life in prison. McCluskey even includes a couple of portraits of former inmates - the only human faces in the whole show - for an extra dose of pathos. "Willie Radkay, Former Prisoner No. 666" looks out at us with soft, dark eyes, and he wouldn't appear any different from the next kindly old grandfather if we didn't know he had served hard time in one of the world's harshest and most romanticized prisons.
- Lindsey Westbrook
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