SUSAN KAE GRANT

Susan Kae Grant is an inventive and influential artist and educator. Her innovative studio practice and distinct personal vision represent one of the mediums more sustained and recognizable contributions to fabricated photography. She has lectured and exhibited her work throughout the United States, Canada, China, Europe, Australia, British Columbia, Africa, Guatemala, and Japan. Her photographic and book-works are included in the public collections of George Eastman Museum; J. Paul Getty Museum; Smithsonian Special Collections; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Victoria and Albert National Art Library. Books and publications featuring her work include The New York Times LightBox; Diffusion Magazine; Adore Noir; Black + White Photography; PhotoVideoEDU; Smithsonian Magazine; DMagazine; Texas Monthly, Modern Luxury Dallas; and FotoMAGAZIN. Two recent books include The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography; and The Elements of Photography (Focal Press).

With an interest in Art and Science, Susan kae Grant uses the shadow as metaphor to create fabricated narratives that explore dreams, memory and the unconscious. After twenty years of creating a cycle of dream imagery conjured from her unconscious and from deep research into the science and magic of human sleep, Grant’s long-term project, Night Journey delivers a haunting shadow world of ethereal photographs. The result of a now signature studio practice, Grant first devises inky silhouettes and symbolic forms, and then invests them with emotional and psychic narrative power. The imagery that unfolds retraces her memory and animates her fantasy in a synthesis akin to dreaming. Working in her Dallas studio, Grant employs a 4 x 5 view camera with a digital back to transform models and props into the contoured scenes of Night Journey.