Sharon Harper's work jettisons this idea of the photograph as a seamless window to reality and replaces it with a magic mirror, a transformative surface that is capable of making the invisible visible and the intangible tactile.
— Stephen C. Pinson,
Curator of Photography,
New York Public Library
"Sala de Arte Instituto Canarias Cabrera Pinto is pleased to announce the solo exhibition, From Above and Below, of American artist and
Guggenheim fellow for 2013,
Sharon Harper. The exhibition opens July 5, 2013 and runs through August 31, 2013. Harper's work, which has been shown and collected internationally, is represented by Galería Arnés y Röpke, Madrid, Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne, and Rick Wester Fine Art, New York.
From Above and Below features twelve years of Harper's photographs and video stills exploring perception, technology and the night sky. Her experimental images draw on varied uses of photography to create poetic connections between ourselves and the environment. Harper's first monograph, From Above and Below, Radius Books, 2012, accompanies the exhibition.
Harper's contemporary art practice expands notions of photography and pushes uses of photography into the realm of poetry. Artist and Professor Catherine Wagner says, "From Above and Below reminds us of the necessity to engage in the act of 'wonder.' Sharon Harper's photographs of constructed observations read like poems of knowledge."
Harper's pictures challenge the seamless surface of photographs, and shift our attention to a relationship between the camera and the way we perceive photographs. Throughout From Above and Below the camera impacts the record it keeps, which is ultimately a visual dialogue transcribed by the image-maker and the camera together. This relationship is a metaphor for the myriad ways technology and art affect and ultimately facilitate our understanding of our surroundings. Charlotte Cotton, curator, writer and author of The Photograph as Contemporary Art says, "Harper reads our celestial skies with a unique combination of scientific and symbolic meaning."
Sharon Harper was born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. She received her MFA in Photography from School of Visual Arts in 1997. Harper's photographs are in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, and The New York Public Library, among others. She has received numerous artist-in-residence fellowships including at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center; and most recently Halsnøy Kloster, Norway. Harper's work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne and Rick Wester Fine Art, New York. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and is currently a Professor, Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is a
2013 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. "
