Exposure: Shauna Frickshorn

Institutional Space

All photos ©Shauna Frickshorn. All rights reserved.

“These images — fragments of familiar-yet-strange institutional spaces — are part of a series that questions the notion of the absent subject. My work looks at the underlying meaning within institutional interiors (carpeted floors, tiled walls, upholstered seating, terrazzo-covered corridors). This meaning is amplified by selectively focusing on the everyday surfaces that cover these man-made environments, or “containers.” On the surface, these empty containers may appear to be neutral. After a closer look, however, they become anything but neutral. Formally, I treat my subjects as interior landscapes to help viewers read themselves into the architecture. By making the familiar into something unfamiliar, I shift the viewers’ attention away from specific places and towards their own memories. I trigger the memory of these non-places by contemplating moments in which nothing can really be said to have happened and by capturing not the instant or “decisive moment,” but rather the duration of the commonplace.”

Shauna Frickshorn lives in Millersville, Pa.

Back to Exposure main page