Constance Thalken (/tah-kin/; born 1952 in Nebraska) is an American intermedia artist known mostly for her photographic explorations of the complexities of loss. She has gained recognition for her ability to carefully convey subject matter that simultaneously engages the viewer perceptually, emotionally, viscerally and intellectually.
Thalken was born in Columbus, Nebraska. She has lived in the Chicago area, the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and in Knoxville, Tennessee. She has a BA in psychology from Barat College and completed an MFA in photography at Yale University in 1988. On graduation, she was awarded the Yale School of Art's Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship to photograph in the Yukon Territory of Canada. In 1990, she accepted a teaching position with the Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta where she continues to reside. She was awarded professor emerita status when she retired from GSU in 2018.
Career
Many of Thalken's influences lie beyond the realm of photography. She is inspired by readings in philosophy, anthropology, fiction, poetry and critical writings. These sources shape her work and provide further depth to her investigations. She has received numerous honors and awards for her work. Her work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Yale University Library, The Bunnen Collection, the Zuckerman Museum of Art and Dean, Ringers, Morgan and Lawton of Orlando, Florida, along with other private collections.
Thalken is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta.
Work
Notable projects
Eyes Open Slowly #2, 2013 43" x 28-1/2", archival pigment printed mounted on dibond
Eyes Open Slowly This 2015 project draws from Thalken's investigations of a taxidermy shop. The body of work includes portrait-like images of stuffed animals in process as well as abstracted close-ups of animal hide, fur and surfaces, such as the salt floor of the shop. Among the images is a detail of animal scratches on a steel exterior door of the shop. The taxidermy process is denoted with varying degrees of subtlety. The completed animals appear alive, while others are pinned and taped and in process of becoming "animal". A signature image depicts a pair of chamois horns, taped together and hanging from wire. Thalken's imagery evokes comparisons between taxidermy and embalming, humans and animals, life and death, and speaks to loss and grief.
1.2 cm = In 1.2 cm =, Thalken presents 45 photographs of bodily "discards" that were removed during her 14-month treatment for breast cancer accompanied by three large scale self-portraits. The photographs of the discarded bandages are labeled with their corresponding medical procedures, e.g. "Biopsy #2 11/27/09" and "Haircut #1 2/23/10", a bundle of hair from her first treatment-induced haircut. The installation includes an ultrasound image of her tumor housed in a lightbox with a list of statistics compiled from her period of treatments. The title refers to the size of her tumor and invites comparison between the small physical size of the tumor and its profound impact on the body and mind. As a whole, the work employs illness as a metaphor for exploring loss, mortality, coping and the body as a medical object.
The Soul Is A Light Housekeeper This project is derived from monthly collections of debris collected from the artist's vacuum cleaner over the course of one year. The photographs, each scaled to the size of the debris pile, document the discarded remnants of daily life and the routines surrounding them. According to Thalken, the images comment "on the former life of the material itself and on my life as the generator and gatherer of the remains".
Red Jacket Inspired by the death of her mother from Alzheimer's disease in 2000, Red Jacket is a 13-minute multi-media performance that re-enacts Thalken's selective memories of her mother. The piece explores several aspects of loss including grief and the manner in which dementia erased the identity of her mother.
Ancient Pieties: Maps of Mexico This body of work consists of photographs that combine images of animals with the landscape and religious iconography of Mexico. The images were created by layering multiple Polaroid film exposures to convey a sense of indeterminacy. Thalken describes this technique as a means to not only "dematerialize the animal in order to convey its spiritual nature", but also to suggest "“the duality of life and death and the uncertainty that lies between".
Fragments of An Elegy Photographed over the course of five years, these images primarily refer to the annual alligator harvests of coastal regions of Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle. The work explores issues of mortality, cycles of life and human-animal hierarchies.
Permanent collections
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas The Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia The Bunnen Collection, Atlanta, Georgia Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut Dean, Ringers, Morgan and Lawton, Orlando, Florida Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston, Georgia
McClure, Faith (2015, December). “Unraveling the elegiac in Eyes Open Slowly”. Catalog Essay for exhibit at The Light Factory, Charlotte North Carolina.
Taxidermy is the art of preserving an animal's body by mounting or stuffing, for the purpose of display or study. Animals are often, but not always, portrayed in a lifelike state. The word taxidermy describes the process of preserving the animal, but the word is also used to describe the end product, which are called taxidermy mounts or referred to simply as "taxidermy".
Angela Singer is an artist of British and New Zealand nationality who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. An animal rights activist, she addresses the way in which people exploit animals and the environment through the repurposing and remodelling of vintage taxidermy, a process she calls "de-taxidermy". Since the 1990s her work has been exhibited both in New Zealand and internationally.
Annette Messager is a French visual artist. She is known for championing the techniques and materials of outsider art. In 2005, she won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale for her artwork at the French Pavilion. In 2016, she won the prestigious Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award. She lives and works in Malakoff, France.
Mildred Jean Thompson was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers.
Deanna Sirlin is an American contemporary artist best known for her large-scale installations and paintings. Sirlin's art has been shown all over the world and includes massive installations that dominate entire buildings in Venice, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, London, England, Antalya, Turkey, New Orleans, Louisiana and Evora,Portugal.
Martha Ann Maxwell was an American naturalist, artist and taxidermist. She helped found modern taxidermy. Maxwell's pioneering diorama displays are said to have influenced major figures in taxidermy history who entered the field later, such as William Temple Hornaday and Carl Akeley. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1831. Among her many accomplishments, she is credited with being the first woman field naturalist to obtain and prepare her own specimens. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.
Corrina Sephora Mensoff is a visual artist who specializes in metal work, sculpture, painting, installation, and mixed media in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. Corrina works with universal and personal themes of loss and transformation, within the context of contemporary society. In Corrina’s most recent bodies of work she is exploring lunar images, cells, and the universe as “a meditation in the making.” In a concurrent body of work she has delved into the physical transformation of guns, altering their molecular structure into flowers and garden tools through hot forging the materials. Her work has led her to community involvement with the conversation of guns in our society.
Sarah Emerson is an artist based in Atlanta, Georgia who is best known for her landscape paintings of hyper-stylized versions of nature. Her work draws inspiration from "battlefields, war propaganda, literature, and idyllic gardens." Emerson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.
Adrienne Outlaw is an American sculptor and interdisciplinary artist. Her work draws inspiration from bioethical issues and biotechnology. Based in Tennessee, she is represented by whitespace gallery, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jane Rosen is an American artist, working in sculpture, drawing and printmaking. While Rosen's career was established in her native New York in the 1970s and 80s, with well received exhibitions and a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts, "a trip to Northern California provided an unexpected pivot for her aesthetic vision and her life." She lived on both coasts and subsequently began a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. Rosen "made the break from her urban existence as an artist in New York to a life as an artist on her ranch in California."
Benita Carr is an American photographer. Born in San Antonio, Texas, she has lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia, since 1989. Her work examines the social, psychological, and physical conditions of being female.
Anya Liftig is an American performance artist and memoirist.
Sheila Pree Bright is an Atlanta-based, award-winning American photographer best known for her works Plastic Bodies, Suburbia, Young Americans and her most recent series #1960Now. Sheila is the author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activist and Black Lives Matter Protest published by Chronicle Books.
Kim Hoeckele is a multimedia artist living in New York, New York whose mediums include performance art, photography, found objects and video art.
Claire Rosen is an American fine-art photographer. She was included in Forbes magazine's "30 Brightest Under 30" list for 2012 and 2013 in Art & Design.
Georgia O'Keeffe made a number of Red Canna paintings of the canna lily plant, first in watercolor, such as a red canna flower bouquet painted in 1915, but primarily abstract paintings of close-up images in oil. O'Keeffe said that she made the paintings to reflect the way she herself saw flowers, although others have called her depictions erotic, and compared them to female genitalia. O'Keeffe said they had misconstrued her intentions for doing her flower paintings: "Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't."
Sarah Hobbs is an artist. Hobbs is from Lynchburg, Virginia. She lives and works in Atlanta.
Pam Longobardi is an American contemporary artist and ecofeminist, currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She is known internationally for sculptural works and installations created from plastic debris, primarily from marine and coastal environments, as a primary material. Much of her work includes community-based research, such as carbon or plastic audits, as well as collaborative art creation.
Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
Dorothy O'Connor is a photographer and installation artist, best known for her hand-crafted scenes that combine elements of still-life, portraiture, landscape, and performance.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
