Artist, JoAnn Verburg: One of the things that comes through in this is my interest in Chinese screens. I loved that they divided the space up in such a way that you could see one piece of space at a time. And in each of the individual frames, there might be a whole sense of a world that would be different in quality and character from the next one over.
Curatorial Assistant, Samuel Allen: That was the artist JoAnn Verburg. In 1995, Verburg began photographing olive groves in the countryside surrounding Spoleto, Italy.
Many of Verburg’s artworks are composed of multiple photographs. When she creates works like this, she will ensure that the horizon line is in the same place from each image to the next. So, there’s an illusion of continuous space, even though the four individual photographs don’t necessarily align perfectly with one another. She’s pushing against the frame of the individual photograph. She’s showing what’s to the left, what’s to the right. How the world exceeds the boundaries of the single image.
JoAnn Verburg: One of the things that I like is that it moves from being abstract in certain places, and the scale is close up in certain places. And then, in another frame, the subject matter is more recognizable in the distance. When you put them all together, I think there’s a sense that there’s not just one way to look at things. There are many ways.