Secret
Games:
Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works With Children, 1969-1999
Secret Games: Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999,
co-organized by the Addison Gallery and the Fotomuseum, Winterthur,
Switzerland is the first major retrospective exhibition of the photographic
work by the artist. "This project has given me the chance to work
closely with the curators to create an exhibition that distills 30 years
of work and has allowed me to understand its continuing evolution,"
said Ms. Ewald.
For more
than thirty years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring
the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a
sustained and evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal,
and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions
of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative
collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, Wendy has traveled
throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia,
Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and Durham,
North Carolina. This exhibition presents groups of work made in each
of these countries.
Denise Dixon
Self-Portrait Reaching for the Red Star
Sky, 1977
© Wendy Ewald
Starting
initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected
to teaching, Ewald's project has evolved over the years to focus on
questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects,
Ewald partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects'
visual inventions encouraging them to use cameras to create portraits
of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams,
and hopes and to work directly with her in visual and verbal collaboration.
"The images are of family and home, shot from within, seized through
eyes that see like windows without glass." said William L. Hamilton,
The New York Times. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving
her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images
in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created"
a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship
and throwing into doubt the artist's identity, Ewald crosses the line
that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic
form.
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Wendy Ewald
Hasmukh, Koli Patel (Farmer Caste) India
1989-90
Polaroid print, © Wendy Ewald
For years
Ewald's artistic collaborations have been widely published and exhibited,
and she has received recognition for her innovative creative practice,
including a MacArthur Fellowship, a series of major grants from arts
funders including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol
Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Open Society Institute and others.
She has over the years likened herself to a "translator" of the images that her subjects create with the camera, but a translator who "acknowledges her own part in making the story."
The Addison
retrospective exhibition consists of approximately 200 photographs presenting
thirteen bodies of work made from 1969 to 1999. Each group varies in its
presentation befitting the character of each project-from 30" x 24"
portraits of Indian children paired with large scale text printed on Indian
handmade paper hung directly on the wall, to intimate 4" x 4" images created by kids in Appalachia, to a recent video installation in
which Ewald's North Carolina students take on the role of Holocaust survivors.
Funding
Secret Games: Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999,
has been funded in part by generous grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a federal agency, SAM Sustainability Group, and Volkart
Foundation. Additional funding has been provided by Peter Aldrich, Sandra
Urie, John Ryan III, Warren Coville, MIGROS Cultural Percentage, Swisscom
AG, Bern, Foundation Zurich Insurance Group, and Bickel Reklamen.
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