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Artist's Statement
"This image was captured in central Maine at the Common Ground Fair where many of the families I have been following gather every year to sell their organic produce and hand-made goods. With many of the families living miles from their nearest neighbor (including the Hansons, who have a cabin in the forest land close to the Canadian border), the fair is one of the few communal events uniting the Maine off-gridders. This tent, like so many of the temporary and permanent structures I've photographed is completely idiosyncratic and reveals the character of the people who constructed it." Editorial Statement Aperture is pleased to release this limited-edition photography by Keliy Anderson-Staley. Evocative of a sort of survivalist Dada—part log cabin and part Merzbau—the dwellings in Keliy Anderson-Staley's (b. 1977) Off the Grid series are testaments to the lives and values of the people who built them. Blending a documentary approach with a topographic style, architectural interiors and exteriors accompany nuanced portraits to provide a fresh look at a lifestyle that is as progressive as it is atavistic. Rooted in personal experience, these photographs are part of an ongoing project documenting the lives of a number of families who have—for political, economic, religious, or environmental reasons—chosen to make their homes in the Maine woods. Often using improvised construction techniques and salvaged materials alongside modern technologies such as laptops, cell phones, and solar and wind energy, Anderson-Staley's subjects have crafted a way of life that is "green," yet markedly distinct from the fad-like associations the term carries. Photographs of homes that began as projects nearly forty years ago appear alongside images of a new generation of solar-cell–clad eco-homes and other non-traditional structures, such as tents and lean-tos, profound in both their similarity to and difference from one another. Attention is drawn to the minor details—a tattoo indicating military service, handwritten signs and postcards—that point to a lifestyle that is as alternative as it is natural for those who choose it. Keliy Anderson-Staley (b. 1977) was born in Massachusetts. She received an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2006. Anderson-Staley was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship in 2008. She currently resides in Astoria, New York. www.andersonstaley.com. |
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