Lucy Capehart

Lucy Capehart

Remnants

March 5 - 30, 2014

At the age of seven, artist Lucy Capehart lost her parents in a commercial airplane crash. For many years after her mother's and father's clothing was stored in the attic of the family home. Capehart began using these tucked-away shirts, jackets, dresses, and robes later in life as the subjects of large-scale cyanotype contact prints. The resulting images that make up her series Remnants consist of white, ghostly outlines of these garments, complete with the subtle details of stitching and buttons against striking blue backgrounds. Capehart's placement of of each piece of clothing suggests life and movement, as if the sun's rays have simply passed through each invisible wearer. The stories of the people who used to inhabit these items remain in spite of their absence, pointing to the extraordinary capacity for objects--especially photographic objects--to contain memory and time.

"The dresses and shirts were stored in the third floor of our house for many years. There was never an explanation of why they were kept or their significance for my parents. After the plane crash the collective family grief was so great my parents were rarely mentioned. As I grew older I regarded these saved garments as tangible evidence of their existence and used them to try and piece together their identities."

Lucy Capehart has been a photographer since 1986. She has held solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, Y Gallery in New York City, the Missoula Art Museum in Montana, and Blue Sky. Her work has been featured on book and CD covers and has been published in the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler Magazine, Oxford American, Architecture and in the book Local Heroes Changing America (Norton, 2000). Her work is in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the Special Collections Library at Duke University, and the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona. This is Capehart's fifth solo show at Blue Sky.