When I first looked at Alex Grabiec’s work, I must have been fresh off seeing David Kressler’s Viewpoints series, because in my mind I paired the two together. To me, both projects explored similar themes – how we experience the natural world, the ways we sculpt and curate the remaining “wild” areas around us, the oddness of combining the man-made with the natural. It wasn’t until I read Grabiec’s statement that I began to pick up on another layer present in the photographs, one more sentimental and personal. I appreciate the series’ play on both “east” as a place and “back,” as in back and forth a particular distance on a regular journey or back in time, in a memory or a place that may no longer exist.
From the artist’s statement: This body of work, titled “back east,” is a group of peripatetic images that offer oblique hints to the transitory nature of place and experience. Photographed along a weekly four-hour commute between a professional life in Baltimore and family life rural Virginia, the series reflects on the desire for home and the resulting perpetual search for it. Within this personal narrative, interweaving subtexts of demarcation, construction, distance, and longing consider the relative ideas of ‘back’ and ‘east’ [and] in doing so [propose] that memory, hopes, and experiences are always in another time, and always somewhere else.
From “back east”
Visit artist's site: alexgrabiec.com
Found via: Lenscratch
Posted July 10th, 2017
