Margaret Wright

Show ran from 5/1/2013 to 5/25/2013

Opening Reception on Saturday, May 4 from 4-7pm

 Almost Out The Door: Stories of Adolescence, photography

Margaret Wright creates this series of contemporary portraits, Almost Out The Door: Stories of Adolescence, to document and explore the intersection in an adolescent's life between the world of their friends and the world of their families.She collaborates with six adolescents to photograph them as they gather together in public and private places, with their intimate friends, family members, teachers and classmates. These photographs represent moments of exchange between individuals and groups - how these people have created privacy or intimacy with their bodies and their gazes and the complex narrative that evolved over time as they connected and disconnected with each other.Wright's technical choices in constructing these images act as metaphors, which suggest the unique framing of a real moment in time. Her manipulation of the picture making process and the picture plane - the changing point of focus, the shifting position, and the use of scale, distortion, ellipses and repetition - amplify the events that are going on in the scene just as we exaggerate and diminish events while they occur and, later, as we recreate them as narrative in our minds. Moreover, the individual frame seams within the larger constructed image, and their varying styles, are visual metaphors for the exchanges between individuals represented in the photograph. The elongated or extended form of these pictures provides a formal device for describing unfolding dramas that occur as time passes and for compressing the passage of time in a still image.