This American artist's photographs of spindly assemblages, destitute factories and dancers from her hometown seem frozen in time and elusive like memories
Sara VanDerBeek's photos capture things that weren't meant to last. She first made her mark as an artist a few years ago, building spindly assemblages strung with images from art books or magazines as well as beads, twigs and feathers. Once she'd captured the precarious little sculptures with her camera, she broke them up again. Her airy constructions may recall Alexander Calder's mobiles, but they were also inspired by the makeshift roadside memorials that dotted New York in the wake of 9/11. Photographed in her studio against a dark backdrop, her images seem like memories, floating through our heads.
These early works create a surreal art-history pick'n'mix, from illustrations of classical sculpture to old black-and-white photography, and similar forms are echoed from work to work. VanDerBeek's instinct for creating suggestive arrangements of images and objects is often put down to her time spent co-running the New York gallery Guild & Greyshkul from 2003 to 2009. Significant, too, is the influence of her father, the experimental film-maker Stan VanDerBeek, who died when she was seven. An active figure in the 1960s New York art scene, he collaborated with the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Yvonne Rainer. He must have been a potent absence for his then Baltimore-based daughter, and his collagist approach to films has certainly influenced her.
VanDerBeek's repertoire of elusive subjects has grown in distinct new directions since she became a full-time artist three years ago, picking up shows at some of America's most prestigious museums, such as New York's Whitney and the Hammer in LA. Her most recent works (on show now in London) are crisp black-and-white photographs of dancers from her hometown. They strike exacting poses, with muscular limbs arcing to form lines as sharp and clean as modernist architecture. But they're accompanied by skinny, angular sculptures that expose the dancers' precision as an utter illusion: beyond the frozen moment of the image, these pulsing, ageing bodies have long moved on with the dance.
Why we like her: For A Composition for Detroit, her 2009 elegy to the beleaguered one-time giant of the car industry, created for New York's MoMA's New Photography show. Inspired by broken windows from the city's factories, her images hang against the dark like panes of glass. A photographic journey through economic decline moves from Walker Evans's depression-era photos to VanDerBeek's own images of the city's destitute industrial spaces.
Rolling with it: After graduating, VanDerBeek spent a few years cutting her teeth as a commercial photographer in London and photographing such exciting subjects as loo paper for supermarket chains – "table-top work" that nonetheless influenced her studio photography.
Where can I see her? At the Approach, London to 24 June. Stan VanDerBeek's work is included in The Historical Box, Hauser & Wirth, London to 28 July.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/07/artist-week-sara-vanderbeek