Statement of Work
Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th Century photographer who proved that all four horses feet leave the ground at once when it gallops, used technology to capture precise moments with a cold scientific eye. Kara Thurmond uses technology for opposite effect in her paintings and photo-etchings.
The dreamlike images in her work, produced via photographic equipment, are always on the verge of breaking apart and losing the objectivity that one associates with the photographic image. The running women and mythic figures that pervade her work are shot on a Super-8 camera, then captured by a still camera and produced as photo-etchings. She uses technology to move away from the calculated and crisp to something hidden and hard to touch, bringing the mystery back into a world obsessed with clarity.
Like Muybridge, Thurmond often works with multiple images, but unlike Muybridge, whose work presaged moving pictures, and showed slight changes from image to image—a man walking, a woman jumping—Thurmond uses the same image, each slightly different from the next because of the process used to make them. It’s an organic movement more subtle than Muybridge.
Thurmond also incorporates sewing into her paintings. The act of sewing, that is pulling pieces together, or reconstructing something that was torn, plays directly against the images, which through their degradation, are moving in the opposite direction. With this she is able to build an internal tension within the work, which gives it another level of meaning. In Thurmond’s work the cold scientific eye becomes filtered through a dream.