Sara VanDerBeek

Since the mid-2000s, Sara VanDerBeek has been testing the relationship between photography and sculpture by creating physical arrangements to be captured by the camera. Incorporating into her compositions printed matter and small items suspended by string, and more recently classical sculpture and architectural elements, VanDerBeek examines the fugitive nature of memory and its evocation through objects and their settings. Her use of repeating geometric forms alludes to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and makes reference to the legacy of modernism. She challenged the notion of a linear progression of artistic exploration in photographs she made in Detroit and New Orleans, two cities in which past glories and present failures stand in stark relief. Speaking of the architectural elements she examined in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, VanDerBeek has said, “I felt when looking down upon them for the first time that these foundations retained in their surfaces the entire history of our civilization.”

Walpurgisnacht depicts objects suspended from an armature of wood and plexiglass. Featuring geometric forms such as a roughly painted torus and a rectangular solid with chevrons, the photograph also incorporates a book page that serves as a counterpoint point to the rest of the arrangement. The page presents the title of act two of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Dramatically lit from the left, the overall composition juxtaposes ideal forms with the insinuation of unbridled menace. This is reinforced by the allusion to Albee’s play in which the characters turn on each other with particular malevolence in the second act.