Art begins for me with an urgent necessity to change the nature of things around me. With a background in Architecture, I think of the image as an elastic and malleable material that reacts in different ways to different ideas, and that may be stretched, compressed or deformed, in order to produce meaning.

 

My current work, Transitory Dwellings, depict empty domestic spaces and neglected human scale objects that function as a reminder of the missing human body and its perishable condition. The elements that appear on the image, a bed, a chair, a door... seem to evoke the intimate presence of the body, and trigger memories that are only fully reconstructed in the viewer's own imagination. Doors are areas of transition, to go from one room to another, but the viewer is not allowed to cross through the layers of intimacy, into the depths of the house. Instead, it is forced to stand on the threshold, as an outside observer, and feel the anxiety of an impossible return.

 

My process begins by visiting a house for a short period of time and photographing its interior. I assemble
different photographs and create a new interior landscape that acts as a residue of my experience of that
place. The new image references a real space and that grants it the authority of the real. However, the new space appears dislocated, disturbing and disorienting, even claustrophobic.

 

Transitory dwellings explores how memory functions for the creation of place and the disjuncture that occurs between our mental representation of place and the encounter of its physicality. Subtle disturbing dislocations like those provoked by revisiting the places we used to occupy as children and finding out that they are gone. The same dramatic mental and physical rupture that people suffer trough displacement, loss and exile.

 

Marta Labad was born in Spain. She is currently enrolled in the MFA  Photo Program at RISD and holds a
degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture of Barcelona. She was part of the International Master Program from EFTI School of Photography in Madrid 2006 and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in the Visual Arts in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in: PhotoEspana 07, 31 under 31: Young Women in Art Photography (curators Lumi Tan and Jon Feinstein), at the Humble Arts Foundation and at the 13th Annual Juried Exhibition (curator Lesley Martin), Photographic Resource Center, in Boston.