Light
Work is pleased to announce our new exhibition
Unmarked, featuring photographs by Stephen Chalmers.
The
large-format landscape photographs in
Unmarked
connect remembrance and the land by investigating the locations where serial
killers abandoned the bodies of their victims. Photographing these places in a
deliberately generic manner, Chalmers presents beautiful but ambiguous
landscapes that seem to conflict with our certain knowledge that something
terrible ended at these sites.
By inviting viewers to gaze directly on the sites of
untimely and tragic deaths, Chalmers gives them courage to confront their fears
about the end of life and its remembrance. The sites are referred to as
dumpsites,
a term made popular by both law enforcement agents as well as television crime
dramas. By acknowledging these dumpsites and the people who died there through
his images, Chalmers lifts a stigma that unceremoniously draws a line of
remembrance between those who died by intentional acts of violence and those
who did not.
While Chalmers treads on sensitive
ground as he explores and documents dumpsites in the Pacific Northwest and
beyond, he hopes to exchange sensational headlines and the inevitable scandal
tied to such sites with something more meaningful. Instead, he offers an
elegant memorial that shifts the viewer's gaze away from infamy and back to the
humanity of the victims. Chalmers
writes, "As a latecomer who has visited these sites months or years after the
event and the associated media coverage, one is immediately struck by the
absence of spectacle, the beauty of the sites, and their silence and
stillness."
Stephen Chalmers' work is featured in
Contact Sheet 156, available for preview and purchase through Light Work's Online Store. The catalogue will be available at the gallery reception.
Contact Sheet 156Stephen Chalmers' Website[Banner Image: Stephen Chalmers -
William Neer and Cole Neer, 2009]
[Top Image: Stephen Chalmers -
Brian Whitcher, 2008]
[Bottom Image: Stephen Chalmers -
25 Male Victims, CA, 2009]
