Rendered History: Art Analysis

Words: 1173
Pages: 5

Rendered History

Rendered History is a photographic exhibition that explores how the images from family albums or a family archive are contemporaneously dealt. How these images seen when put into relation with today’s family. Do they only speak to the past or can they speak to the present as well. What if these images could be amended, rendered, and or altered. The work in this exhibition seeks to answer that question. Each artist alters their images in their own way, but that alternation leads to a new reading of the image and also makes the viewer question the images original context (or intention). Whether that be the dynamics of family (Bradley), Family Trauma (Coburn), exploration of family history threw illness (Harris) oor Memory,
…show more content…
Examples of those being the illness of alcoholism that plagues his family, the suicide of uncle that still haunts his father, and the abuse of his grandmother and mother at the hands of his grandfather. Coburn pairs his photography with images from his own archive to speak to this, but also uses found images as well. Coburn physically alters found images and the images from his archive. Thus allowing them to direct speak to the traumas that have infected (or affected his) family's …show more content…
Many people in images and news paper clippings that he uses are unknown to him and some are. Harris is trying to make sense of archive that his Nana, its keeper, is no longer able to pass the stories and identities due the illness of dementia. Harris has become the new keeper and to make sense of all it and to also speak the current reality of the previous keeper he has delved into this history. He has tried to render it accurate to his knowledge of the past but also the present state his Nana’s ability to remember her