“maybe curtains”
Home, for me, is not a fixed location but a layered construct—an evolving archive shaped by personal histories, inherited memories, and collective loss. Home is a pliable and complex container of memories experienced and told by unreliable narrators.
Maybe Curtains is a collection of photographic sculptures exploring the malleability of memory and the layers of meaning we assign to our personal histories. The work aims to address how memories dissolve and reform, how time stretches and contracts, and how space can be both a container and a void. By working with old family photographs and the archaic wet plate collodion process, these pieces inherit ghostly qualities showing how photographs are not static, but instead active agents in the formation of memory and our own personal narratives.
These pieces are complex, living reliquaries, where past and present coexist, where memory is both a shelter and a distortion. They question how memory constructs space, how time alters our relationship to home and how absence can be just as palpable as presence.
Katherine Dean is a visual artist based out of Indiana. Her work exists at the merger of traditional and contemporary photography. Dean’s research mixes archaic 19th century photographic processes with modern imagery to explore ideas of the dissolution of time, memory, and space. Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently with a solo exhibition, Pabst Blue Ribbon, at Veterinarhogskolen Adamstuen, in Oslo, Norway.
Dean is a Senior Lecturer of Photography at Purdue University. She earned a MFA (2017) in photography from Memphis College of Art and also holds a BFA (2014) in photography from the University of North Florida.
website: katherinedeanstudio.com
Instagram: @ke_dean
