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Carola Clift Special Projects

Opening up the spaces between reality and the sense we make of it.

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About

Carola Clift Special Projects are intended to have a strong personal and public impact on their audiences. These are projects that speak to essential, human questions; they are intended to increase the surface area of our experience of life. My aim is to do this by subtly disrupting what we think we already know, and opening up new possibilities within us. These projects will act upon and activate parts of us that have gone latent, and stimulate new modalities of perception, thought, and emotion.

Currently there are five projects I'm working on that fall within this category of special projects.

'Closer by Far,' has already benefited greatly from an existing fiscal sponsorship with Fractured Atlas. By way of great distance (from commercial planes at an average of 35,000 feet), it brings to the fore what is otherwise thought of as the backdrop of daily life, taken for granted, or left unseen, and aims to restore people's direct relationship to this mysterious beauty that is available to our eyes, and a sense of wonder. Using a combination of scale and specific materials, this project separates the larger geographic poetry from how we human beings have made sense of it--the map is not the territory--and in so doing, places human activity within a much larger context of time and space.

The second current project is called 'In Your Eyes.' This project provides a way for each individual viewer to see his/her own latent biases—what and how they see a visual situation, as well as what they miss. We know that everyone who looks at a painting sees something different. But few of us really know how we, personally, look at the world, as distinct from others. Or how what we see on one day might differ from what we’d see in the same situation a week later. Using special technology, ‘In Your Eyes’ will make this subjective aspect of art into something explicit, tangible, and specific to each viewing and each individual viewer.

The third, most pressing project for which funding is now needed is to complete a portfolio of photographs of a spiral house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his son in Phoenix. This will be a companion portfolio to one that my father, acclaimed fine art photographer William Clift, already made of the house: two generations, two genders, two artistic visions, two ways of working, and two different photographic mediums: his, a large-format B&W film view camera with tripod; mine, a hand-held iPhone digital color camera. The project began as a commission from the family who purchased the house, saving it just before it was to be demolished. They wanted to make it into a center for the Arts, in the spirit of Wright. Unfortunately, zoning approvals were not forthcoming, and they suddenly had to abandon not only their plans but our photographic project as well. This occurred after talks were already underway with several museums and university architecture school art galleries, for exhibition, as well as with a publisher who has signed on to doing a book. All images have been taken, and my father’s exhibition prints have been completed, but half of my own images still need to be completed. Because of the collaborative nature of the project all exhibitions and the book depend on an equal number of images from both of us. Funding is needed to pay for the production costs of these last several prints (all photographic images have been taken; this is just for proofing, printing, mounting, framing, and image work, such as contrast, color, and retouching).

The fourth project addresses the #MeToo issue. Using fragmented photographs of a woman’s body and mirrors, it is about seeing ourselves—each of us individually, in real time, using the specificity of reflections. It is about our relationships with female sensuality, our relationships to others, and especially, to ourselves within that context.

The fifth project, called 'A Blank Page' is based on the metaphor of a person being like a blank page when she is born. Upon this sheet, her life is written. This project will be a projected video portrait of a well-known icon, whose persona was the result of many authors. It is about the relationship between form and its vital content; it is about essence and persona; the authorship of who, what, and how a person is, and the question of perception versus conception. It also speaks to the phenomenon of celebrity. I believe it speaks to fundamentally human questions, and because the icon I've selected for it is known throughout the world, I believe it will resonate strongly with a very wide public.


Learn More: http://www.carolaclift.com