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Tressa Pack: FictionsPost an Event »
In this compelling series of immersive photographs, Tressa Pack makes the tools of “photographic fiction” visible, placing lights, stands, silks, clamps, and power packs, in a variety of seemingly passive landscapes. While the landscapes, placement, and organization of the equipment vary, in each image, the highlighted space where the subject normally resides is empty. The photographs simultaneously denote this absent subject, while alluding to the presence of the maker. Interestingly, while Pack exposes the tools of photographic fiction, she also utilizes them, making deliberate aesthetic choices that subtly operate on the viewer. The result is series of images that are rife with underlying, albeit ambiguous, narrative tension.
This series was conceived while Pack was a graduate student at Mills College. Individual images from Fictions appeared previously in Pro Arts Gallery's Bay Area Currents Exhibition as well as at Interface Gallery. However, the series is presented here for the first time as a complete set of works. Pack presents five, 40 in. x55 in. prints from the series, accompanied by a new book of all twelve images, and an edition of 17 in. x 22 in. prints.
Pack will also introduce a secondary body of work, Textblocks, which acts much like a collection of footnotes to Fictions. The images are made up of blocks of text taken from famous fictional works by such authors as Samuel Beckett, H. P. Lovecraft, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad. Like the images in Fictions, the text blocks take a distanced look at the tools of fiction, allowing the viewer to reflect upon how our narratives are constructed for us, while simultaneously drawing us into them.