GUILLERMO SRODEK-HART
Contemporary artist Guillermo Srodek-Hart earned his BFA from Tufts University and MFA from Mass College of Art. His work has exhibited internationally, most notably in the 55th Venice Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of the Attleboro Museum of Art, Bruce Berman Collection, Danforth Museum of Art, Kivosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Fundación Klemm Fundación Petrobrás, Larriviére Collection, North Dakota Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Artist statement:
I drive to the small rural towns in the Argentine countryside to get away from what I know. For me, being uncomfortable stimulates creativity. When I enter one of these forgotten rural communities, sometimes with population 100 or less, I stop, get out, and talk to people. I tell them I am interested in old stores, places that still function in a separate time, running on their own agendas. Sometimes I think I am photographing the last rebel’s strongholds, operating by their own set of rules. Like a detective, I describe what I am looking for as I flip the photos in the folder I carry with me. 'I am looking for places like these, general stores, old bars, shops, bodegas or any funky places like these,' I ask while flipping through the photographs. My project takes on a collaborative nature because the people I meet point me to new locations, and that’s how I build my itinerary.
During the actual photographic process, I develop a short but intense relationship with the environment I am in. The large-format camera goes on a Tripod, it is a wooden box with interchangeable lenses and a bellows extension, like ‘the ones they used to have in the plaza.’ While focusing, measuring, dragging and looking through the dark cloth, the place slowly begins to breathe, it grows, it becomes alive. This is what I am looking for: to transcend the purely descriptive / objective quality of photography and achieve a more subjective and intuitive way of looking, what Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida as… ‘a kind of subtle beyond…” I want to penetrate the image through its surface, to be sucked into the environment, be absorbed and captured by it.