#FIFCyL2022
Representing rural America
RJ Kern's 2016 series of photographs portrays the face of American and contemporary farm youth. This large-scale project spans several years and installs the viewer in a relationship with time that brings back a temporality close to that of nature. The treatment and workmanship of this work also refer to a pictorial tradition that goes back to naturalist painting.
Alison Nordström is an independent curator and historian of photographs based in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose work considers all kinds of photographs and the ways they are used and understood. In addition to ongoing publication and exhibition projects, she is a Visiting Scholar in the Graduate Department of Photography, Lesley University and a Museum Associate at Harvard University.
In 2018 she was a curator for the Hamburg Triennial of Photography. In 2015 and 2016, she was Artistic Director of the Lodz (Poland) Fotofestiwal, and from 2004 to 2013, Senior Curator of Photographs and Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House.
She has curated over 100 exhibitions of photography, in nine countries, including extensive surveys of landscape, portraiture, journalism and contemporary art as well as important exhibitions and publications on Lewis Hine, Robert Rauschenberg, Pictorialism, and the photographies of colonialism. She holds a BA in English Literature, an MLS with museum emphasis, and a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.
R. J. Kern (b. 1978) is an American artist whose work investigates ideas of home, ancestry, and a sense of place. His portraits focus on intimate, interdependent relationships of people, animals, and landscape as a means of exploring how ancestry shapes identity and how myth intertwines with personal history. His camera has led him from an inquiry into his lineage in the farming communities of Scandinavia and Ireland to the examination of similar communities near his home in Minnesota. Increasingly, his attention has been captured by the next generation of young people, who may or may not be the stewards of rural communities and economies in the future.