TABITHA SOREN
‘Running’
Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles
13.04.2013 - 18.05.2013
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of San Francisco based photographer Tabitha Soren’s Running. In this series, archetypal figures struggle to escape or arrive – the viewer cannot be sure. Uncertainty, chaos and vulnerability infuse Soren’s universe: elemental fears made visible. The subjects’ movement forces them out of their heads and strips them of control. A theater of the absurd unfolds as Soren describes our shared instinct to survive. Her figures stumble, grimace and lose composure. They are both wounded and heroic.
Telling her subjects little more than where to run, Soren forces her subjects into real moments of vulnerability and physical exhaustion, their movements providing subject and viewer alike with an opportunity for un-self-consciousness amid a general loss of control. In these snapshots of constructed artifice and uncontrollable motion, Soren depicts a moment in-flux leaving the viewer with something inconclusive and unresolved. Never revealing the motivation of the runner, or their pursuer, the narrative of these images appears to turn on what lies outside the frame. The entire series is characterized by cinematic tension and shared anxiety.
© Kopeikin Gallery | Tabitha Soren