Gardening Tools, San Diego, California

Artist Taj Forer American, born 1981

Date2006

MediumChromogenic print

DimensionsImage: 30 x 30 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art

Object number2007.12.2

On View

Not on view

Label TextTaj Forer’s photographs are from a recent series that focuses on Waldorf schools and bio-dynamic farming communities throughout the United States; places that have been influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the Austrian philosopher, scientist, educator, and artist. Forer’s quiet photographs find beauty in the mundane and everyday with a painterly sensibility that transcends a purely factual depiction. Portraying places and people that seem to be a throwback to another era, he captures the idealism of communities that seem to be searching for a utopia, an Arcadian place in the contemporary world.

As Taj Forer has stated, “Every photograph is a document. It doesn’t necessarily take a huge set and a lighting crew and actors and costumes and makeup artists to make a very powerful image that we respond to on many levels. I think that a conceptual conversation can happen just as readily around a straight, found image.”
[L. Dougherty, 2008]ProvenanceCreated San Diego, CA, 2006; collection of the artist; [Yossi Milo Gallery, New York]; sold to NCMA, 2007.

Published ReferencesThreefold Sun: Photography by Taj Forer (Milan: Charta Art Books, 2007), illus. (color) 83.Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Presence/Absence," November 27, 2011-May 27, 2012.
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