VIVIANE SASSEN Pikin Sleep & ELSPETH DIEDERIX In These Shadows SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Casemore Kirkeby, 1275 Minnesota Street, #102, San Francisco
November 4 – December 22, 2016
Viviane Sassen and Elspeth Diederix first met in an art class as teenagers and have remained close friends throughout their adult lives. While they came to photography via different routes, both cite their childhood experiences as Europeans living in Africa as formative to their sensibilities, and both create images that challenge the tendency to quickly categorize and make sense of what we see, especially when confronting a photograph. Instead they invite us into worlds that demand a sustained attentiveness, where novelty and surprise are fully integrated into the surroundings and textures of the everyday, and images and objects resonate with their own strange authority. They also privilege the highly personal and subjective view as the most open-ended approach to their material; whether working at home or abroad, both artists are fine-tuned to the experience of displacement, of finding the familiar in the foreign and vice versa, and create a generous space for what lies between.
http://casemorekirkeby.com/exhibition/viviane-sassen-elspeth-diederix/
