photo-eye Bookstore is excited to host the opening reception for Empty Spaces: A Exhibition of Color Photographs by Eric Cousineau and Barbara A. Diener on Friday, August 28th, 5-7 pm. The exhibition will continue through October 17th, 2009. Eric Cousineau and Barbara Diener's portfolios explore the concept of home through the juxtaposition of the familiar and foreign. Cousineau's images capture the details in the home away from home of motel rooms. In these spaces, an anonymous person has imposed their notions of comfort on to the room. This pseudo-environment of the familiar is filled with lamps, beds, lounge chairs and TV, yet these spaces feel strange and vacant. Emptiness is also palpable in Barbara Diener's self-portraits posed in various familial and interrelationship roles, though the void is metaphorical. Diener portrays a character whose posture, gestures and eyes often show a person devoid of emotion, her expression as familiar yet impersonal as the floral curtains of an unoccupied motel bath as shot by Cousineau. Deiner's staged "tableaux vivants" and Cousineau's still lifes are facades of home, but each frame reflects the artificial nature of the domestic situation, an uncomfortable truth of our quotidian lives.
The photo-eye Bookstore is located at 370 Garcia Street, Santa Fe, NM and is open Monday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For more info on the exhibition of Eric Cousineau & Barbara Diener, please email Melanie McWhorter.
