Stacy Kranitz (American, b. 1976), Pine Mountain, Kentucky, 2016, from the series, As it was Give(n) To Me, 2009-2022, archival pigment print, 16 x 24 inches, edition of 3, courtesy and copyright Stacy Kranitz.
As it was Give(n) to Me
Stacy Kranitz
Jan 17-March 12, 2023
Presented with the Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR
Triennial opening artist talk & reception:
Thurs, Feb 16, 6-8pm
Talk Location, 6pm:
”Card Family Auditorium” in the Engineering, Math and Computer Science Building (EMCS, Room 201) (map)
735 Vine Street, Chattanooga, TN, 37403
Reception immediately follows, ICA Galleries
The ICA, in partnership with Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR, presents the complete opus of Stacy Kranitz’s (American, b. 1976) body of work As it was Give(n) to Me (2009-2022): an expanded artist-based archive of photographs, collected images, text, and sculptural objects that traces exploration and extraction in central Appalachia. These documents reflect on our relationship to representations of reality and the inherent flaws and ruptures in constructed notions of truth.
Working within the documentary tradition, Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict. Poised between notions of what is right and what is wrong, she uses photography to open up narratives that confront our understanding of culture.
This presentation of As it was Give(n) to Me is curated by Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator of the ICA Chattanooga. This presentation is supported by a 2022 Annual Artist Grant from the Puffin Foundation, and generously supported by Tri-Star Arts.
About Stacy Kranitz:
American photographer Stacy Kranitz (American, b. 1976) was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Her first monograph, As It Was Give(n) To Me (Twin Palms Publishers, 2022) is shortlisted for a Paris Photo / Aperture First PhotoBook Award. Additional awards include Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year, the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography and a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant. Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019), and she has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015) the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France and the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022). She works as an editorial photographer for clients including Time, Vice, National Geographic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. She holds an MFA from University of California, Irvine’s Department of Art and a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
The 2023 Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR is a program presented by Tri-Star Arts, which serves Tennessee by cultivating and spotlighting the contemporary visual art scenes in each region while fostering a unified state-wide art scene.