Congratulations to Guillermo Srodek-Hart whose work, Rural Installations, has gained significant attention from the press: La Nación and Arte al Día (English) among others.
Rural Installations are uncanny, loaded and magical. Photographs of abandoned architecture in states of decay in far-flung corners of the Argentinian countryside. Like his early work, Stories, these photographs engage our curiosity and reward careful looking. Guillermo Srodek-Hart used a mix of old and new technologies to discover and capture the abandoned spaces. To find these places Srodek-Hart used word of mouth and satellite images. An even mix of 4x5 and drone cameras were used to capture this work. The former is more true to the artist’s traditional practice, and the latter an adaptation that allowed exploration of inaccessible spaces. These clandestine vistas focus on a triad of related subjects- grain elevators, estates, and gas stations. The ethereal qualities of the 4x5 is heightened by the aerial vantage of the drone camera. Together the dialog of vignettes and elongation translates as intangibility. These strategies add an uneasy dynamism- space pulls around us like a cloak that grounds us, yet we have the sensation of floating. These places speak to the way new horizons invite manifest destiny as much as abandonment and reclamation.
Excerpts from Arte al Día | by Santiago López
“Rural Installations” series walks the liminal space between the most rigorous documentary record and the most expressive artistic photography. The combination of image formats reflects the need to tell a story that goes beyond what we see, entering into their how and why.
"I don't think of myself as a photographer who exhibits, I think of myself as a photographer obsessed with collecting the fragments of the world that he likes," says Srodek Hart, and in that eagerness to collect fragments, he knows his task is to find the best way to capture them. Although his traditional training leads him to self-identify as "old school", he’s the first to appreciate the need to adapt and evolve in the development of his way of working.
Srodek Hart's work generates a sense of urgency from what we see, not as an absolute past, but as part of the constant progression of time, in which our attempts to build are no more - or less - than installations, artistic and ephemeral experiments on the spaces we inhabit.
