Charleston photographic artist Kirsten Hoving relishes the fact that no two viewers will have the same experience of her work.
“Everyone gets different things out of the work depending on what they’re bringing to the image,” she said about her show “Wanderings at the Mermaid’s Palace,” currently on view at Redux Contemporary Art Center through Oct. 19. “I like the idea that there isn’t a set meaning; that meaning is really fluid in my work.”
That sentiment goes beyond a conceptual sense, too. Hoving’s work is literally changed by perspective, as her photographic shadow boxes seem to move as you gaze, almost like holograms, with figures shifting in between the planes of reality and surreality.
In “Wanderings,” Hoving creates a mythological narrative that follows a mermaid wandering alone in an expansive and decadent palace.
Strange and magical places
Hoving, who began her second career as an artist in 2008 after retiring as a professor of art history at Middlebury College in Vermont, is a storyteller through and through. Her works always take the viewer to strange and magical places. An example: the collaborative project with her daughter and fellow photographer Emma Powell. The project, Svala’s Saga, is a tale told in 50 photographs where heroine Svala is confronted with the sudden loss of the world’s birds and embarks on a quest through the wilderness.
In “Wanderings,” Powell again serves as the primary model in Hoving’s photographs, which take on poetic proportions by the artist’s printing on silk organza and intriguing layering of imagery. In one of the works, jellyfish fly around a ghostly moonlit figure. In another, the mermaid cares for the fish that swim through her lonely palace. One diptych seems to depict a soul choosing her place in the physical world from among the stars.
Hoving’s work can be understood as a counterpoint to the photography we typically see. Most photographers capture the world around them without manipulation — especially in the era of the smartphone where we are constantly documenting our surroundings. In contrast, Hoving stages shoots with cinematic props and costumes, then adds new meanings through her experimental process of layering one image on top of another, creating photographic objects — and, on occasion, even incorporating unconventional materials like mirrors, glitter, and in one body of work, hardened Christening dresses.
“One thing I really push in my work is going beyond the traditional definition of a photograph, which is supposed to be a two-dimensional plane with color or pigment on it,” Hoving said. “I’m really interested in how to expand that definition, especially in this digital age. I want that handcrafted, personal kind of effect.”
For this reason, her work greatly rewards an in-person viewing experience, as Hoving invites her viewer to participate in a visual and conceptual wandering.
“I often get comments from people like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ which, with photography, is pretty hard to do. I like to straddle between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, the stable image and the kinetic image… a lot of them do feel like they’re moving, or literally are moving, in the cases with the free flowing silks.”
Indecisive moments
There’s a concept in photography called the “decisive moment,” which refers to the exact moment when a photographer captures a unique event in a frame.
Hoving explained how she subverts that approach in an interview at her Redux studio: “I like to think of my work as ‘indecisive moments.’ You can’t really pin it down to a particular time or place… I’m often playing with the veil between reality and another kind of reality.”
The veil is a common motif for Hoving to describe the movement from one plane of existence to another; the real versus the surreal; our mind’s constant altering from one state to another.
She seems to depict imagination itself, which makes sense considering how big a role it plays in her experimental process.
“As far as I know, we’re the only species that can imagine — and especially imagine the future, which makes us special. Humans have this wonderful capacity to imagine things, which leads to all kinds of spiritual and technical leaps. I think that’s huge.”
Our imagination, Hoving says in her artist statement, “is what makes us human. Our ability to see the world through metaphors, stories and poetic allusions connects our minds to our hearts.”
View Wanderings in the Mermaid’s Palace until Oct. 19 at Redux Contemporary Art Center. Learn more about the artist at kirstenhovingartworks.com or on Instagram at @kirstenhovingartworks.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.