migrations II
by Janet Link

October 2nd - December 12th, 2021

exhibition photography by Sally Van Gorder

migration: a tide of movement (of persons, groups of people, animals, atoms) that’s difficult, if not impossible to control. Any attempt to restrain or facilitate such movement requires one to understand the force that drives it.

Janet Link’s migrations II is part of an ongoing series begun in 2015 while the artist was in residence at al maqam, near Marrakesh, Morocco. What began as a technical exercise in composition and light evolved over time into a more personal record of the impulse to know what is unknowable, the value of a search for what can’t be found, and an attempt to describe what can’t be put into words. For more than thirty years Link worked exclusively from life, but when she began to draw migrating shadows she was immediately confronted with the futility of trying to pin something down that is constantly moving and changing. The attempt to arrest the shadow in a drawing prompted her to work for the first time from photographs, which in turn propelled her to shift the way she thought about the images she made. The lure of the ambiguous and ineffable is the force that drives her studio practice. By using only four source photographs to create this entire body of work she is forced to peer closely into this narrowly limited set of boundaries, from a point of view that is out of focus and removed from clear context. The task of translating digital information, captured with a cell phone, into the extra-analog language of charcoal and graphite requires one to slow down the act of looking, and the resulting drawings are an account of time spent observing with close curiosity that which by its very nature, is temporary.