Featured Artist: Clair Dunn

To kick off our featured artist series, we'll start with artist Clair Dunn. She currently has a large selection of her photographs on display at Staart including many solarized black and white images that are just haunting. Below is her bio and you can see her work here. This Friday evening, Clair is holding a reception at Staart from 5 -7 pm. Stop by and meet the artist!

Clair Dunn lives in Fletcher, Vermont on land that has been in her family since 1867—land that is not only in the family, but in her blood. The result of her second visual career is on this wall. And it is deeply Vermont. Clair’s Vermont. The disparity between her earliest memories of Vermont in the late forties and the current state of the State. Memories of the cold water hand pump in the kitchen, the functioning outhouse near the woodshed, the incredible advent of the second-hand pull-chain flush toilet, followed by a squeeze-handled hot water faucet and a bathtub, memories of sitting by the big window and watching the very few cars go by at night in the ‘50s and being able to tell who it was by the shape of the tail-lights. It was a world without strangers. Those driving on your back road were your neighbors, the same ones on the four and eight party lines connected to the weighty black phone with the distinctive ring. Impossible now to capture the source of these memories, her photographic work seeks to capture what is left that summons these memories—the faint traces of what is gone, what little is left, and what she knows is going. The camera may record in color, but Clair sees and feels in black and white, then and now. Above all—or beneath all—is rural Vermont. Taking to heart the words of the great Depression Era photographer, Dorothea Lange: The camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera. Clair will continue to seek out her black and white visions of her black and white Vermont.