Conversation with the Artist: Stephanie Taiber

In Natural Order, Stephanie Taiber highlights the delicate nature of attachment within and between generations of family.  She portrays family as a contained unit in which the members are perpetually moving apart. Within this somewhat fragile, yet binding structure, behaviors subtly influence one another, over time converging into familiar patterns. Much like the game Rock Scissors Paper, which involves mindfulness, observation, manipulation, emotional intelligence, strategy and skill, all too often in family life the gains equal losses. The cyclical tension between the different roles the artist plays as daughter, wife, and mother exploits the emotional complexities of togetherness and separation within the everyday intimacies of familial life. Taiber explores these concepts utilizing objects which assume fragments of memory, vintage photographs, and gestures indicative of connection to build a collection of contemporary imagery rather than traditional family portraits.  Treating old and new images as artifacts, she suggests that the dynamics of relationships are subject to the laws and forces of nature, forming and eroding over time and under circumstance. Her work blends both biographical and conceptual threads which together expose a vulnerability that resides deeply within personal connection.

About the Artist

Stephanie Taiber is an artist based in Chicago, Illinois, who works in photography and installation. She holds a BFA in Printmaking and Photography from the University of Arizona. Her art practice explores the tension between internal and external constructs of identity, with special interest in relationship dynamics, power and intimacy, consciousness and memory. Taiber has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving several juror’s awards. She has been selected as a Top 100 artist for Aint Bad’s Curators Choice (2018), a Review Santa Fe 100 Photographer (2018), and a Top 20 Finalist for Brighton, UK’s Open ’18. In 2017 she was a Top Ten Finalist for the Summer Fresh Exhibition at Klompching Gallery in New York and was shortlisted for the Lucie Foundation Photo-Made Scholarship.

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