ZOË SHEEHAN SALDAÑA

Meanwhile

January 18 – March 10, 2005
Contact Sheet 130

Photography is a medium of change. The photographic image is something to be admired, copied, manipulated, cherished, studied, and rethought. In the late 1970s and early 1980s when artists including Cindy Sherman, James Casebere, Sarah Charlesworth, James Welling, and others allowed us to think of photographs as more than merely evidence of things seen but representations of experience known and imagined, photography took a turn that has divided, stimulated, and confounded photographers, artists, curators, and the general public.

Major exhibitions at Light Work are published in Contact Sheet. Exclusively from Light Work, this publication is available by subscription only.

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña embraces the changeable and pliable nature of photography and for the past several years has explored these qualities of the medium at the intersection of high and low tech. Her source materials range from photographs of missing children and images of dangerous places and perilous occupations she finds on the Internet, to common consumer packaging including the lowly paper bag. What ties these seemingly disparate subjects together is that Sheehan Saldaña sees photographic meaning as indestructible because it has entered our lives at nearly every intersection and is no longer just a representation of the real but a currency of experience, description, and interpretation.

Reproduction, repetition, and our understanding of what is real are both the subject matter and object of suspicion in Sheehan Saldaña’s work. Whether that work is done by machine, by colored pencil and ink, by postings on the Internet, or through the lens of the camera, she shows us that photography is a language for exploding and questioning our perception—not just a medium for describing what we can see through the rigid frames of mirrors and windows.

Art Media Studies Photography Annual

January 18 – March 10, 2005

Hallway Gallery
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
Gallery Hours: 12 – 5 pm, or by appointment

Each year Light Work hosts an exhibition of work by senior photography majors in the Department of Art Media Studies at Syracuse University. This exhibition features a diverse selection of work by thirteen photographers, all graduating in 2005 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in art photography.