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Attracted to Light features Doug & Mike
Starns' recent portraits of the nocturnal moths' mysterious and undeniable
draw to light. This series focuses on their explorations into the
conceptual and physical relationship of light and darkness. Most of these
images were captured on the porches of the Starns' lakefront properties in
upstate New York. According to Demetrio Paparoni, an essayist, "For
the Starns, light is more than enlightenment; it is the gravity of all our
past experiences and our future, the conscious and unconscious, the
external and internal factors that drive our lives. The pull of gravity
that light has over the corporeal body of the moths is like breathing,
like thinking, impossible to deny." To create their unique
portraiture of moths, special macro lenses were custom-made. Then, as is
the artists' practice, they created printing methods and techniques that
approximate and imply the metaphorical meaning of the subject and concept
itself.
The Starns have been working in the
territory between photography, sculpture and painting since the early
1980's, and occupy a unique position within contemporary art practices of
photography. Their lifelong artistic collaboration has focused on the
photographic print representing the cycles of time, change, and age. Their
work has marked a shift away from the photograph as a sacrosanct
two-dimensional image representing a concept or distanced view of life,
towards a confrontation of photography's material existence and inherent
fragility. Serving as a metaphor of life, their photographs are vessels
for images that reflect upon these themes.
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