Susan Alport: Close Relations

Artist Statement
Close Relations is a participatory installation inviting viewers to contribute personal definitions of “kinship” after looking at those offered here.

My intent is to create an opportunity to build individual relationships with people who connect with the work and are moved to respond via drawings, notes, emails, or texts about what “closeness” means in their own lives, as I have displayed its meanings in mine.

In this surround are figures who have impacted my life in crucial ways and still do. Some are blood relatives, either known during my lifetime or unmet during theirs. Others are figures from art and literature who stand as close to me as kin. Here are characters, too, from novels beyond life on whose ways of being I have modeled my own, and poets and philosophers and others who speak more directly to me than people I’ve encountered in real time.

Using nontraditional photographic processes to create these images allowed me to get closer to my subjects in order to interpret them in my own way. Whether found, saved for years, or inherited, every image was re-photographed and reprinted so I could see the face anew. My goal was not to create a perfect print, but a replica that conveys something “true” about the subject’s inner self that resonates with mine.

Who would be in your prints? And how would you select and compose your circle of close relations? What are your determinants for feeling close? Do any of them match what you perceive as my criteria for closeness?

The table is yours to answer how you want or can, or not at all. I will reply to each response upon request during and after the run of the show.