Yesterday, NPR.org’s picture show blog featured the work of Kate Stone.  I knew Kate at Bard, but had missed her thesis show; boy, am I grateful to NPR for cluing me in to what I’d missed.

In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene.  In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms.  In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. There is a wonderfully self-reflexive quality to the images, as Kate reconstructs what we imagine her experience to be exploring the spaces for the first time; there is also the entrancing quality of the uncanny, most powerful in the images least tampered with, those that reveal just a hint of Kate’s touch.

But there’s something else operating here: signs of construction—seams, folds, the way the glossy paper reflects the lighting—remind us that the images are handmade.  These aren’t spaces manipulated digitally: they are built, and it is the building that transforms Kate’s photographs into inhabited memories. In At The Seams, the titles of the photographs—such as not a single word, anna, or you should have come around the back—hint at something private between Kate and the owners, something learned in the space.  We are looking at dollhouses.

We are reminded, too, that the original spaces are themselves constructions.  In At The Seams, we begin to see the houses as homes.  In Wunderkammer, the constructed unreality of the museum comes to life, straight out of the curator’s dreams.

Check out Kate’s website here.