Erin Siddall

Genkan, Photographic Series, C-prints, 16×20 inches, 2012, including installation view at AHVA Gallery.

 

Hard to define thresholds of inside and outside in the photographic series Genkan/Entryway. In this series, the artist documents the entryway to each home entered during a trip to Japan in 2012.  This subtle space marking a shift between public and private domestic spaces in Japan echoes the interstitial nature of the suggested evacuation zone in Fukushima Half-Life. These works intend to question what it means for an artist to suggest or draw such distinctions in relation to the act of documenting.  According to Catherine Russell, the oxymoronic label “autoethnography” announces a “total breakdown of the colonialist precepts of ethnography” and “as a kind of ideal form of antidocumentary ‘Because autoethnography invokes an imbrication of history and memory, the authenticity of experience functions as a receding horizon of truth in which memory and testimony are articulated as modes of salvage’”.