After the Threshold
"…what we are looking at in these photographs is often looking itself."
–Vicki Goldberg
STATEMENT
After the Threshold is a series of Archival Pigment Prints made between 2008 and 2012 subscribing to a preset pictorial structure of either three or four images printed on a single sheet of paper. The resulting composite images (printed in two editions of 24”x38” or 38”x60”) cohere into a single-grid composition. This formally seamless, yet cognitively disparate, narrative flits from conscious to unconscious, and seeks to build upon Fifield’s longstanding interest in the nature of perception and the formation of memory.
“Blurred landscapes and muzzy views through windows and curtains suggest that neither machines nor people see clearly all the time,” writes Goldberg. “Our own vision is frequently blocked in [Fifield’s] photographs: people and heads are seen from behind, or from too far away to identify, or reduced to shadows….As fragmentary and disrupted as they are, her multi-part photographs mirror familiar but largely unacknowledged conditions of our lives.”
After the Threshold is also augmented with a video component: As If Nothing Had Happened, 2013, a single- channel, two-minute loop that threads through four paneled images. The subjects shift, yet seamlessly connect through natural elements of weather, the human gaze, and movement. A woman pulls on the oars of a boat as if in a reverie; we hear a downpour through a canopy of trees; we catch a fleeting glimpse blue sky and white clouds through the Oculus of the Pantheon.
After the Threshold, an illustrated, 96-page monograph, with an essay by Vicki Goldberg, is available from Kehrer Verlag, 2013.
