“Time, memory, and the natural world always play a key role in my work.” – Marcia Lamont Hopkins
Photographer, Marcia Hopkins
By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language to her photographic images, Marcia Lamont Hopkins opens the door to the unknown, to multiple realities, both real and artificial, so that one questions what is really happening.
Her images establish a link between the landscape’s reality and the artist’s imagination. While this could, to some extent, be said to be true of any artist using landscapes, Hopkins pushes the limits of our perception of what is real. Each object or environment seems entirely natural and plausible, yet the juxtaposition within the artist’s gauzy, dreamlike atmosphere creates an uneasy sense of mystery. Is our understanding shifting in relationship to time, memory, or some other reality that we can’t quite define?
"Casaubon" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
In her artist’s statement, Hopkins explains it this way: “The series, Causabon’s Illusion, crafts a series of metaphorical vignettes rooted in elements of magical realism and the mind’s tendency to search for all-inclusive answers. In George Elliot’s Middlemarch, Edward Causabon spends his life in a futile and absurd attempt to find a comprehensive explanation for the whole of civilization’s knowledge and mythologies. Deluded, he believes that he alone has the key to humanity’s searching, an illusion which may be reflected in our culture today.”
"The Beekeeper" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
As part of her 60WRD/MIN project, Art Historian and Chicago Tribune art critic Lori Waxman wrote of Hopkin’s work: “We like to control animals and nature, but when they get beyond our understanding things tend to get interesting. Hopkins envisions overgrown forests, historic graveyards, farm animals, and occasionally people, often in combination, in impeccable digital prints that blend multiple shots into believable wholes. The weirder and more convincing, the better: a sheep enmeshed in a dense forest seems as if it and the trees are made of the same stuff, a lama in a rolling meadow becomes one with the horizon and the clouds.”
Hopkins currently has a solo exhibit at Gratz Park Inn in Lexington, KY.
*Burnaway: The Voice of Art In The South, March 27, 2017
Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky
Education: BFA in Film and Fine Art and a Ph.D. in Psychology.
Website: http://www.marcia-hopkins.squarespace.com/
"Cemetery Sheep" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
"Wedding" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
"Pyramid" by Marcia Hopkins, 17x22in, digital archival print (2017), $500 | BUY NOW
Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.
Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.