Tabitha Soren

Tabitha Soren (b.1967, San Antonio TX) is a photo-based artist whose photographs are held in many private and public collections, including the LACMA, the Getty, Harvard Art Museums, the New Orleans Museum of Art & the George Eastman Museum of Photography, among others. Soren's first monograph, “Fantasy Life", published by Aperture in 2017, follows the Oakland A's 2002 draft class for 15 years-from their first spring training to their post baseball lives, where some ended up as celebrity millionaires playing in the World Series and others struggle with poverty and homelessness. Her most recent body of work, Surface Tension,was exhibited at Wellesley's Davis Museum in 2019 and at Cleveland's contemporary art space, Transformer Station, in 2020. This fall, as part of the Feminist Art Coalition project, an expanded version of the exhibit will open on September 18 that Mills College Art Museum in Oakland as a solo show and at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. The Surface Tension book will be published this fall by RVB Books, Paris, with an essay by the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino. Additionally, this summer, “Fantasy Life" will be part of a group show (curated by Erin Corrales-Diaz) at the Worchester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Soren's work speaks to the twists of fate that can unhinge us. Her photographs visualize psychological states; the internal weather that storms through each of us. RUNNING depicts the fight or flights response. PANIC BEACH upends the viewers as panic attacks do. FANTASY LIFE is about what it looks like to strive for greatness. SURFACE TENSION reflects the struggle we all face as we adapt to technological domination. Her newest body of work, Some Blows Are Heavy, hovers between illusion and object. The photographs are shot out in the world but the second of the process is decidedly studio based. This series links the photographic process to the much older deeply human history of mark-making. Pigment prints are sculpted by hand to make a new picture.All photographers turn the 3D real world into a 2D image with their cameras. In this case, though, through cuts, bends,blasts,holes and carvings in the paper, classic landscapes and portraits are bruised into 3D objects again.It's a conflation of photography with painting and relief sculptures.This body of work is that its an inquiry into how to materialize contemporary photographic culture. Embracing accidents is a necessary and important way of working for me. I needed to get a step away from the straight photograph . We've all been taught the truth in photography arises from the belief in the “photographic moment."The camera lens is the unmistakable eye: light traces on negative film deliver proof. But instead, I'm adding light traces, scans, acrylic paint, and handmade markings on to the print to explore ideas beyond the visible truth.