Clare Strand

Landskrona Foto : Solo Show

Clare Strand – Selected Works 2005–2022

Over the past 25 years, British artist Clare Strand has established herself as a significant and influential figure in contemporary art, known for her often unconventional approach to photography.

Specially curated for Landskrona Foto Festival, we are showing selected works at Landskrona Museum. Strand’s work has been exhibited widely, and she continues to be a prominent voice in discussions about the future of photography. We invite you to immerse yourself in Clare Strand’s compelling world.

In the first room, we present the work Snake (2017), which combines archival imagery of women holding the reptilian creature alongside a machine, live-printing snake poetry that spills out onto the gallery floor.

Entering room two, a series of small looped films are displayed showing young women performing simple magic tricks, titled Egg from Mouth, Head Turner, Brain Floss and Mouthstreamer, (2007). Accompanying them in the room is the series Skirts (2012), a wry yet stoic typology of hospitality table dressings. Both the films and the Skirts appear to imply that, just like a magic trick, photography can hide as much as it can show.

In room three, Strand draws inspiration from early-20th-century sci- entific and instructional guides of the Gilbreths, an American husband and wife team who were the first to commercially use photography to measure and ‘better’ the workers’ experience. These studies, conducted in a darkened laboratory called “The Betterment Room”, involved attaching lights to the workers’ extremities, while slow cam- era shutter speeds traced their movements, to be analysed later. The Gilbreths asserted that photography serves as a more ethical form of Time and Motion study, due to the cameras ‘objective’ nature. For this show, we have chosen to display the small polaroids that were the by products of the Type 55 Polaroid negatives.

Adjacent Flatland Spaceland (2012) is a work that references the 1884 book Flatland written by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The story, nar- rated by a square who transforms into a cube, exalts dimensional travel from 2D to 3D and beyond. It also references class, gender, and hierarchies, highlighting the importance of questioning one’s beliefs, the embracing of critical thinking and openness to experi- ences beyond one’s own. Using this as an analogy for the photo- graphic medium, Strand presents us with a series of 3D geometric shapes constructed out of processed photographic paper alongside their 2D templates. Here Strand seems to suggest that photography needn’t be square, flat or representational.

Following on from this consideration, Strand’s recent work Playing a Photograph (2022) presents a piece of chamber music played to the ‘score’ of a small photograph overlaid with red penned numbers corresponding to the tonal values of the print.

In the final room Strand presents The Colour of Class (2001–2022), a series of small black and white works made colourful by the pro- tective glass of the frame. This work was created as a commission around her response to the City of London. Each colour references the Charles Booth mapping system of London (1880), ranging from the poorest areas shaded in black to the wealthiest represented by a golden yellow.

Finally, Material (2015), is a wall-mounted, black metal box. Here visitors are invited to look through the peephole and experience the small particles of light floating in space within. This is a subtle nod towards the material that our visual devices respond to, data transmission and what our images are assembled from.