Stephen Inggs

About

Abstracted, enlarged, and isolated from context, an old telephone, a pair of dress-maker's shears, a few flowers in a make-shift vase, acquire an aura and presence both as objects of aesthetic attention and as catalysts for re-imagining our own past or that of a previous generation. In Stephen Inggs' museum of memory equivalents, each photographed relic invites a poetic reverie of personal associations that combines with more public connotations made precise by their South African origins. This history of settlement and change is suggested but never labored. Each image implies a particular relation to land, history, and a form of life, yet connects with universal concerns about the evolving nature of our relationship to the place we find ourselves in and to the everyday items around us.