Irrational images flash through our minds all the time, in dreams and daydreams. Ahndraya Parlato’s work imagines an oscillation between these »internal« and »external« images, revealing the possibilities of different realities. Combining ten years’ worth of images, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange draws on Parlato’s experience being raised by a single mother who was mentally ill. From an early age, Parlato was put in the unique position of having to decide whether her mother’s observations and fears were real or imagined. These photographs allow her to move between various realities, acknowledging the validity of her mother’s world, while also questioning the boundaries of normal, abnormal, sane, and insane.
Parlato (b. in Kailua, Hawaii) is currently a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. In 2014 she published East of the Sun, West of the Moon, a collaboration with Gregory Halpern. Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections, four chapbooks, the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010), and Sonne from Ort (2012, with Uljana Wolf). He lives in Berlin and Brooklyn, and directs the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute.

Authors: Christian Hawkey
Artists: Ahndraya Parlato

Designed by Ahndraya Parlato, Michael Schmelling
Cloth hardcover
30 x 24 cm
104 pages
56 color ills.
English
available
ISBN
Euro 39,90
2016