SHOW 006
Anika SteppeDecember 2 - January 9
915E 60th Street
Floor 2. Chicago, IL
Thousands of Answers
A slide is a positive photographic image on transparent material. It is intended to be placed in a slide projector to be viewed at a grander scale by a larger audience. Yet, what happens when the slide itself sits in a miniature gallery? Does the smaller surrounding now mean it is a large photograph? This play of scale and impact is inherent in photography; it has the ability to transmute scale and material—reducing a landscape to a 6 x 7cm piece of film; enlarging the shadow of an atom into pixelated wonder. It seems to serve as an urgent reminder: of the significance of perspective and history; of the power of the small. Though, is it even fair to call it small?
*the title comes from Octavia Butler’s essay A Few Rules for Predicting the Future
Anika Steppe (1991) completed her BS in Photography at Ithaca College in 2013 and received her MFA in Studio Art at University of Texas at Austin in 2018. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Steppe explores the medium’s capacity to mediate, not the world as such, but our ever-shifting relationship to it. These photographs do not “capture” places, “arrest” moments; rather, I am the one apprehended, seen, caught amid framings of her and my own creation. This is the work’s great gift. Steppe brings us to the photograph’s edge. A limit, but a false one, delineating an absence we can’t help but fill. It’s boundlessness, and our own, on the line.
—excerpts by Francesca Balboni, on series A Matter of Relationships
https://www.anikasteppe.com
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