2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageRana Young
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Friday, October 25 - 9:20AM to 10:00AM
Saint Kate Hotel: Simone Ball Room B
Visual Elegies: Photographing Intimacy and Loss
My presentation will share and discuss two personal projects, The Rug's Topography and Lie and Smile. Peering through a diaristic lens, I produce images that employ themes of tension, voyeurism, and transition, as reflections on the past and as projections on the future. Familial narratives aid me in rendering visual elegies in response to personal perceptions of memory, identity, trauma, and escapism.
The Rug's Topography began with me photographing my intimate partner of six years. Collaborating visually to express our reflections catalyzed the reconciling of our emotional intimacy amid separation. Through the juxtaposition of gaze and gesture, we create blended self-portraits, expressing our emotions concerning who we were and who we'll become.
Lie and Smile is an in-progress series through which I examine the fleeting and estranged relationship I had with my mother. While investigating my matrilineal succession, I construct prosthetic memories to reinterpret what I've learned of her life and embalm her death. In responding to her mementos, photographs, and absence, I'm attempting to render a version of her that I can confront; a version of her that I can forgive.
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Rana Young
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