About

ARTIST STATEMENT/BIO

Claire Giddings is an artist working in photography and the owner and principal of the graphic design studio Clairvoyant Design. She is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at American University of Kuwait. She has an M.F.A. in Photography and Interdisciplinary Studies from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a M.S. in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Wellesley College. She worked as an Art Director in New York and taught at CUNY Tech, Pratt, MICA, and Rutgers University. She has shown at Pioneer Works, PhotoPlace Gallery, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fitchburg Museum of Art, Boston University, Gallery 500 in Baltimore, and the Organization of Independent Artists Gallery in New York. 

PHOTOGRAPHY STATEMENT

Claire got her first pair of glasses at age seven and spent a great deal of time exploring the world with myopic eyes. As a child she would remove her glasses to see how lights form diffused circles in her nearsighted pupils. Even as her family moved to many countries, when she took off her glasses she returned to a familiar place. The photographs of the Insight series are the result of a revelation that occurred when she went back through the shots she had taken in recent years and discovered she had kept many images that were blurred or taken in low light. She became aware of how her nearsightedness influenced her photography. She expanded this idea to capture visual particularities and deficiencies of certain other viewing apparatus such as streaming video glitches, extreme incorrect camera exposures, Google Maps pixilation of landscapes, and lightening storm distortions of cable TV image feeds.

Claire is trying to understand humanity in an increasingly wired world through her photography. How do we use our time, what motivates us, and can we find significant experience and emotional connection in mass-produced media? The works Memory Safari and the Screen series explore these themes. The Shone series investigates what it means to be an individual in such an environment by returning the imagery back to the body in a visual mapping of an intimate, enveloping, and meditative environment. Her images deal with how time can fracture memory and create nostalgia for a person, place, or event that only exists through mediated imagery, be it through digital mapping software, blurred images taken in low light, collaged images, or photographs of tv/laptop screens.