Stefanie Young's photographic prints are forays into art-making that she describes as "translating a representational, perceptual experience." Her photographs often use the gestures of subject and space, synthesizing spatial experience, perception, and memory. She means to raise epistemological issues, questions of knowing, Bergsonian considerations of memory as a prerequisite for perception. Often her camera takes in an object that can be seen to be under or behind glass, a coign of vantage that helps transmit what she calls the "theatre of space," situating the viewer in a fixed observation point connected to the framing of the image. The fact that she works in black-and-white allows her the greatest range of surface and variables to investigate the subtle differences of illumination possible in all that we may perceive.
Young has exhibited her work widely in both her native New Zealand, Australia, and in New York City. She holds a MFA in photography from the Pratt Institute and is currently lecturing at Waikato Institute of Technology in New Zealand.
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