Clare Strand:–Illusions of a Medium

Clare Strand’s videos are “Moving Photographs”. They are based on the same black-and-white visual universe with studio lighting, serving a similar purpose. At odds with the contemporary landscape that seeks extreme visual attention, reproducing a semblance of reality, Strand’s work questions the notion of truth and the absurd in photography. Her work asserts in no uncertain terms the non-sense of life, and that any attempt to control the world through photography merely exacerbates the problem. By exploring subjects as varied as the Victorian portrait, crime scenes, magical and the supernatural, these series play with the characteristics of photography, which she constantly redefines and challenges. These are the limits of the medium, its enigmatic potential, the simultaneous revelation of its triumphs and its failures, which stimulate the artist’s creations. When the subject calls for it, Strand turns toward the moving image. In her series Conjurations, the references to illusion call to mind the first experiments by Georges Méliès, without closing itself off aesthetically and historically. They are a supplemental variation aimed at subverting the conventions of the still image.