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Ann Kaplan

SPE Member since 2011
Member Chapter: Southeast

2014 Caucus Application Portfolio

Living in a time where histories and current realities cast difficult and complex shadows, the assignment of meaning is suspect. My work looks towards greater significance in the context of a deep contemporary complexity. In an age where we continue to recognize the realities of difference, it considers what our relationships to one another are now and could be.

I make photographs and video installations that pause the viewer within micro-moments that are saturated with multiple, layered perspectives. Slowing down and sometimes stopping the view, the works visually dwell on how individual perception changes what we experience. Considering the role of perspective in questions of race, religion, history, and belief, they offer a meditative consideration of the role of positionality in the creation of our reality.

Conversations & Confrontations, the overall project, follows my own autobiographical threads to explore modern day instances of oppression. My photography and videos address localized and specific places that encapsulate the always complex and often conflicting meeting points of identities and cultures. The people and places within this overall project illustrate moments from reality seemingly randomly captured, yet carefully composed, suggesting the many individual stories that intersect within them. These works enunciate humanity and difference. In my willingness to examine my own relationship to dominance, I invite viewers to consider these realities in the world, locally in paths they themselves travel, and within their own lives.

Transit, a series within the project, explores lingering racial segregation in the Southern city where I live, looking at public transit as a microcosm of simultaneous physical proximity and social isolation. Within my home area, these realities means that public transportation is one of the few places that brings together people who do not often co-mingle - into what has the appearance of intimate, geographic space. These rail lines and riders are a few steps from my front door.

Transit I

Transit III

Transit IV

Transit V

Transit VII

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