March 2014
Artist’s Statement
Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee
Blending autobiography and an extended narrative on landscape, time, and place, this work offers an intertextual examination of geography and personal experience.
Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee invites one to consider the significance of particular ways we perceive our histories. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is made out of memory and desire, of shifting gestures that point towards what has happened and will happen. There are places that make us, and in some way, we make them. Our means of survival speak of how we value and use the natural world according to our senses, and shows how our own history becomes aligned with the history of a site. The terrain of these stories is built out of personal geographies where we seek comfort and sometimes solitude, where the light is regenerated into three hundred golden bees, calling forth desires that are reconcilable.
Displayed as gelatin silver contact prints, the interplay of person and place is seen through discovery and mark marking, echoing the sights and sights of our experiences. These moments explore the value of place, as it exists in our contemporary lives, and its connection to a past that we may know or imagine.
Biography
Allison Barnes is a large-format photographer. She received her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts and her M.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has been the feature of numerous publications such as Aint-Bad Magazine, Oxford American, Der Greif, Lenscratch, One One Thousand, and Ticka Arts. Barnes has exhibited in solo* and group shows throughout the United States and internationally, including Autobiogeography*, Geography Lessons*, Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee*, and Personal Portraits, curated by the National Portrait Gallery. She was chosen as one of 30 Under 30 Women Photographers 2012 by Photo Boite and received honorable mention in Flash Forward Emerging Photographers 2013 by the Magenta Foundation. Barnes’ work is included in Catherine Edelman’s, The Chicago Project, as well as the Detroit Center For Contemporary Photography. She is a contributing photographer to The Cultural Landscape Foundation and co-curator of Tathata (2013) and Field Notes (2014).
