Kim Llerena
August 7-29, 2015
Ekphrasis
In this body of work, verbal descriptions of visual artworks as well as passages excerpted from books and essays have been transcribed into Braille. Each page is then photographed in a way that interprets an essential element of the text that it features, layering description onto description and questioning what exactly is lost or gained in translation. The transfiguration of tactile code into image here serves as a metaphor, both for the power of photography to aestheticize the mundane and for the limitations inherent in the act of recording the world in two dimensions.
Kim Llerena is a photographic artist currently based in Washington, D.C. She received her MFA in Photographic & Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Journalism from New York University. She has exhibited nationally and currently has work on view at the Houston Center for Photography and at VisArts in Rockville, MD. She was a finalist for the 2014 Trawick Prize in Bethesda and a semifinalist for the 2013 Sondheim Artscape Prize in Baltimore. Llerena serves as term faculty in the School of Communication at American University. Her work frequently examines various dualities of the photographic medium: memory and aspiration, translation and description, art and snapshot.
