ANNELIES STRBA: A WILLOW GROWS ASLANT

Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present A Willow Grows Aslant, an exclusive online exhibition featuring a selection of works by Swiss artist Annelies Štrba. Here, Štrba’s digitally manipulated photographs present surreal forested landscapes, ranging from panoramic mountain vistas to alluringly saturated images of flora. The female figures populating these environments seem to be in states of dream and contemplation, unaware that we have glimpsed their private world.

As with Hamlet’s Ophelia, from which the title of this exhibition is drawn, the sights these figures observe cannot be known and we are not privy to either their interior or physical travels. Similarly, all that Ophelia has left in retrospect of her journey to the willow and brook is the wonderance of what was beheld there. The immersion of Štrba’s figures inside these landscapes illuminates how wilderness can serve as a retreat, an escape, a hiding place, and a space to gain perspective. A sense of the weightlessness of oneself in a larger world is manifested, yet questions of motivation and experience are left behind to contemplate.

Annelies Štrba was born in Zug in 1947. Her work has been featured in many international gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate Gallery, Liverpool; the European Museum of Photography, Paris; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, among many others. Štrba lives and works in Richterswil, Switzerland.