CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/27/2015

Barbara Kasten: Stages

"Construct XXII" (1983) is reproduced from Barbara Kasten: Stages, the exhibition catalog to ICA Philadelphia's eye-opening career retrospective of this important but previously overlooked artist. In conversation with Liz Deschenes, Kasten comments on the Construct series. "It was a term connected to Bauhaus ideology. The work was a construction that was made on site to be photographed. It also relates to the fact that an object is being photographed and yet part of the idea is to deconstruct that reality and make it an abstraction rather than representing the real thing. What always fascinated me about doing photography in this way is presenting something in three dimensions and yet denying it as well, with a flat surface. I could paint those shapes—and I certainly looked at enough painting, such as Kandinsky, who used similar constructed forms—but I was bringing the contemporary into it by using photography. I was using photography in a way that it was not supposed to be used."