Hannah Starkey: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to announce Hannah Starkey’s first exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Hannah Starkey constructs complex, yet seemingly fleeting images that primarily portray women's encounters with other women and their environment. Seeking to explore "everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective". Her images often portray moments of quiet drama, touching upon areas of experience which are familiar but which remain unspoken or below the surface. Suggesting narratives based on chance experiences and personal impressions within the shifting structures of contemporary society Starkey captures her subjects in the private moments that often occur in the most public places, from lobbies and restaurants to libraries and hospitals.
The images are the result of precisely chosen locations and staged rendezvous within our shared urban environment, and respond to everyday human experience. Importantly, Starkey uses not “actors”, but people she encounters at the locations she is exploring. Seeing this approach as inherent to the engagement with the environment, and further emphasising the mutual psychological shift between the subject and their surroundings.
Also, predominant in this latest body of work (through 2005 – 2006) is the attention given to the relationship between physical and represented space. Aware of the psychological effects our surroundings can impose, Starkey further explores these notions to sometimes eerie effect. The absence of a horizon line or vanishing point, reflective surfaces and the presentation of a three dimensional space represented in two dimensions within the artists frame all serve to reinforce the abstract and psychological drama.
