Photo by Jessica Tampas
Alice Hargrave
Alice Hargrave, a photo based artist, incorporates sound, video, and photographic imagery within layered site specific installations addressing impermanence: environmental insecurity, habitat loss, and species extinctions. Recently, The Canary in the Lake, exhibition and monograph, revisualizes climate related data from lakes on all seven continents. In 2023, Hargrave was selected to create original artwork for Chicago’s esteemed public art program through the Chicago Transit Authority where her works will be translated to etch and printed glass at Mayor of Munich where she was recently in residence.
Hargrave collaborated with The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to create her project Last Calls, portraits of threatened birds using sound wave patterns of their vocalizations in the wild. Last Calls is widely exhibited, internationally in Lianzhou, China, and won a 2020 Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, and the 2019 finalist award. The bird call patterns are translated into “Haute Couture” garments by Dovima Paris where profits directly benefit the birds. Paradise Wavering Hargrave’s monograph (Daylight 2016) and extensive solo exhibition traveled to multiple venues across the United States.
Hargrave, is included in several permanent collections such as The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago Artist Book Collection, The Ruttenberg Collection, Willis Tower, Aurora University Art Museum, and many private collections. She has exhibited internationally, been reviewed in journals such as Huffington Post, BBC News, and ARTNET, and her research awarded her Artist Residencies in The Florida Keys, Montana, Vermont, Wisconsin, and a fellowship at Ragdale. Hargrave taught full time at Columbia College — currently she is pursuing conservation work and climate activism through her artwork — putting the work to work is her modus operandi.
Artist Statement
Mies at Night, although made as a singular image and not part of a series, it can be seen as a piece that continues the concerns of the Paradise Wavering work, which reflects on the notion of impermanence—of the natural environment, our personal experiences, the larger human condition, and photographic processes themselves. Color is an important aspect of my working process. I experiment and work liberally with color, adding layers of tone like I did in the analog color darkroom or when steeping images into subsequent toner baths. Color is a tool with which I can inscribe emotion onto media, helping to express the parallels between fugitive image, fugitive nature, and fugitive memory.
My palette is inspired by early color photographic processes such as Autochromes and by the color shifts inherent to various photographic media which delineate the passage of time. Photographic processes fade with their own distinctive patina, or color cast; aqua images from one decade or raw sienna from another, exist like relics of photographic paint pigments. I love how 1970’s Polaroids fade to ochre yellow or green. The color shifts themselves are sublime, and can literally color our memory.
Photography is the art of the fleeting, an attempt to catch hold of all things ephemeral —light, love, nature, time, happiness— however futile this attempt may be, we still try to grab hold of time, but time and memory are fickle.
This quote from George Sand embodies my artistic practice. “The consciousness of self as animal, vegetable, and mineral and the delight we feel plunging down into that consciousness is by no means degrading-- It is good to know the fundamental life at our roots.”
Release Date: February 28, 2025
My Photograph Mies at Night was made in S. R. Crown Hall, which was designed by the German-American Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and is the home of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. The play of the warm interior light with the shadows of outdoor plants reminded me of traditional shoji screens from Japanese architecture or of a theatrical background in front of which we can place our own actors transcribing any scene our imaginations may insert. Not a blank canvas, but rather an emotionally charged, luminous, colorful, and organic place from which to dream.
Mies at Night, 2018