ARC's May Exhibition Features the Photography of Margaret Wright

ARC Gallery features the work of photographer and life-long Chicagoan Margaret Wright this May. 

Exhibition Dates

May 6, 2013 through May 25, 2013

Artist Reception

May 4, 2013

4:00 to 7:00

Graduation - Digital photograph and collage on archival media

Margaret Wright's Almost Out The Door: Stories of Adolescence is a series of contemporary portraits which document and explore the intersection in an adolescent’s life between the world of their friends and the world of their families.  "I have been collaborating with six adolescents to photograph them as they gather together in public and private places, with their intimate friends, family members, teachers and classmates," she says.  "These photographs represent moments of exchange between individuals and groups - how these people created privacy or intimacy with their bodies and their gazes and the complex narrative that evolved over time as they connected and disconnected with each other."

The series is composed of digitally photographed and collaged panoramas printed on archival media in sizes ranging from 12” x 28” to 18” x 75", with some images reaching the length of 90".  Wright describes the construction of her images in parallel with the flow of events in the lives of the young adults she documents.  "My technical choices in constructing these images act as metaphors, which suggest my framing of a real moment in time.  My manipulation of the picture making process and the picture plane - the changing point of focus, the shifting position, and the use of scale, distortion, ellipses and repetition - amplify the events that are going on in the scene just as we exaggerate and diminish events while they occur and, later, as we recreate them as narrative in our minds. Moreover, the individual frame seams within the larger constructed image, and their varying styles, are visual metaphors for the exchanges between individuals represented in the photograph. The elongated or extended form of these pictures provides a formal device for describing unfolding dramas that occur as time passes and for compressing the passage of time in a still image."

Wright's work in Almost Out the Door is partially funded by the Albert P. Weisman project completion grant.

You may see more of her photography and her collaborations with the collective Standard Usage Project, of which she is a founding member, on her website at http://www.margaretwright.org/.  Look for her exploration of the urban community at Stella's Diner on Broadway during Chicago Artist's month this October.