In each of Karen Knorr's works, space and time are under influence, totally reformulated "inside" (as it were "indoor") by fabricated elements, which tend to restore the presence of the world against a background of absence of any spontaneous reality. The doors of these intestinal places open only on themselves, and the windows occult the sight in the brightness of the light or the mutism of the darkness, when they do not look on a closed room."
Nathalie Leleu
Les filles du calvaire gallery shows two photographic series by Karen Knorr: Sanctuary and Spirits.
In Sanctuary, the large-scale photographs depict the paintings and interiors of the Wallace Collection in a narrative involving wolves, monkeys and exotic birds. These works reference the allegorical traditions found in some of the paintings, which question the boundaries between human and non-human.
The Spirits series was commissioned in 2001 by the Marcovaldo Association in Italy near Caraglio. Karen Knorr photographed the interiors of a church, a theater and a palace in Savigliano, to which she added incongruous elements such as pheasants and owls, the birds of this particular region of Italy that invade the architectural interiors. The titles refer to religious paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries.
About Karen Knorr's work, Nathalie Leleu writes:
"The image stands on the threshold of space, as the verb opens that of time. For the image-maker and the story-teller, it is all a question of knowing how these tools of meaning will be used to cross this threshold, in order to arrive at the landscape and the narrative. That is to say inventions, coherent and autonomous structures, whose function is to instrumentalize the theoretical dimensions of perception to offer a tangible support to a shaping of the imaginary, this invisible and yet obvious maze. All is question of strategy in these representations, whose setting in perspective of the beings and the things cannot make unless of the setting in abyme of their soul."
