C-Train Gallery: Friday, 23 March 2012

Ellen Jantzen: What does loss look like?Friday, March 23 at 4:00pm

Catastrophic losses usually have a face; think war photos, photos from the World Trade Center, crashes of various sorts but I am interested in personal loss.

I have always been interested in alternate states of reality, but looking over my last few series, those initiated and completed since moving to the Midwest from California, I see that I am also dealing with "loss" in some form; loss of friends, home, youth, and the ultimate loss, loss of life. Death transforms us; reality shifts, but to what?

Our move to the Midwest was stimulated by a need to help my mother-in-law as she sucumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer's. I became acutely aware of not only the aging process, but also the vagaries of memory and the sense of loss that permeated our lives here. I started ex­ploring how a person adapts to losses; how they are absorbed by events and changed; how they actually experience loss.

I set about to address these issues through a pho­tographic photosynthesis in this body of work; choosing photography as the medium to help me reveal and at the same time envelop truths in a manner that, hopefully, is universal. My attempt is to indicate how the corporeal body/mind/spirit is absorbed and transformed.

C-Train Gallery
4320 Forest Park Avenue
St. Louis MO
314-454-7683