When we see our parents and elders through our own eyes, we’re only getting one dimension of the story.
Tempe artist and photographer Kris Sanford encountered a diary that her grandfather, someone she never met, had kept in 1954. That particular journal inspired Sanford’s exploration of lives, families, and loves – obscured and lost through the passage of time – in her latest “Between the Lines” show.
In Sanford’s works, couples, families, and individuals have been carefully cut from vintage photographs and placed amongst handwritten journal text. The thoughtful juxtaposition subtly suggests the weight of the unspoken tales of past lives while people blur into the written word, eliciting the fading memories of generations left behind.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Sanford’s works in this show tell us that those thousand words might not be enough.
Fri., Jan. 14, 7-9 p.m., 2011
