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Introduction |
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Rather than a linear progression, I see my work as more of a web of interrelated ideas or approaches. I try to keep that web as open as possible. At any one time I might create a narrative where things seem to string together, but soon the narrative shifts, finds itself reconfigured. Over the last 3 years a lot of my work has evolved around my studio on west 29th street in New York. I have started to think of this material as a body of work. It consists of films and photographs of the interior of my studio (such as the film Transition), of views out from the windows (such as the album Margins), and of the space in between (such as the film Bricks out the Window). Taken as a whole, they are about the transition between inside and outside, about time and place. The films and photographs from 29th street also string together under the grouping Time Pieces. I have been photographing light moving through a given space over a period of time. These I make into films by combining the images, so that they dissolve into each other. I use the transition between images, the movement within the image, or the movement within the frame to create a sense of the passage of time. The work is about how the movement of light expresses time. As films made from still images, they are also about the different temporal structures of film and photography. If the 29th street work, or Time Pieces, is essentially about is time and place, another string appears in the way time and place concepts relate to memory and identity, as in my recent project Cristina's History. Taking the multi generational migration story of a branch of my family (from Poland to Portugal to Guinea-Bissau) as a metaphor for the dreams and dashed but undefeated hopes of modernity, Cristina's History is about identity and Diaspora; about how the modern day experience of displacement and migration can be taken as a basis for personal identity. Preceding Cristina's History were War Story (1995) and Notes from the Periphery (2003). In War Story I retraced my father's journey as war correspondent during the close of the Second World War, photographing the places my father wrote about then as I found them 50 years later. The exhibition presented those photographs with excerpts of my father's writings. It was shown widely in Europe and the U.S, including at the International Center of Photography in New York. A selection from War Story is included in the permanent installation of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Notes from the Periphery was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2003. It presents three series of photographs, from France, Senegal, and Trinidad, each relating to a different attribute of modernity. The underlying theme is an evocation of modernity's origins in the Triangular Trade. Going further back, other works include Common Places (1996) about the manifestation of cultural identity in ordinary urban spaces of four typical European cities, and the Border Project (1993), which looks at the changing notions of borders in Europe. My first book, Silent Passage is a study of an isolated lake in Sweden, an "undisturbed" slice of nature. (Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1985). A more recent publication, Pleasant if Somewhat Rude Views, is an artist's book revolving around photographs of the relationship of a small French farming village to its archeological past. (One Star Press, Paris, 2005.) In this line of landscape work, a more recent project is Settling into Nature. These photographs examine a small valley in France, an area whose ecosystem was severely damaged by various public works projects in the '70s. The exhibition pairs the photographs with excerpts of writings on the contemporary landscape, and as such offers a reading of ways in which ecological issues are understood and interpreted in contemporary culture.
Levin was born in New York City. He is of French and American nationality and was raised in those countries as well as in Israel. He lives in New York City. | |