AMY FRIEND
b. 1974, CanadaAmy Friend creates multi-layered photographs that transport viewers into an emotional dream world. She devotes herself with great intensity not only to such issues as identity and the past but to the medium of photography as such. She works with various methodologies through photography, installation, and community based collaborations. Friend’s work fluctuates with investigations relative to history, time, land-memory, dust, oceans and our connection to the universe.
Just as photographs are fragile objects in themselves, their content is often fragile as well. Amy Friend’s work highlights precisely these two qualities: the fragility of the photographic object and of life. The artist reuses, revisits, backlights -practicing holes on the images-, re-photographs and, therefore, re-signifies old portraits that came to her through different sources. With this elegant modus operandi she achieves something exceptional as she is able, through light – the raw material of photography – to bring these old images back to life; she is able to illuminate the darkness that surrounds the past and, at the same time, turn it into something beautiful.
Text courtesy Alzueta Gallery.
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