“alleverythingthatisyou”
For the Starns, the six-sided nature of snow crystals appears less important than the ways in which the flakes hover between one state and another. As the Starns photograph, the crystals are in a process of alteration from solid to liquid, from organized form in space to aqueous blob on a surface. They suggest a transitiveness that photography, as a medium devoted to stilling the moment, would seem to contradict. Instead of appearing as specimens, in the manner of 19th century scientific observation, the snowflakes are objects of transformation.
Few of the Starns’ snowflakes are models of perfection, and in this they remind one of finding starfish and seashells scoured by the tides and left to dry on sandy beaches. Many have parts missing, or they have all their detailed armatures on one side but not the other. Here again – and despite their appearance on gallery walls in grid-like arrangements – the Starns’ images exceed the aesthetic register of the catalog. Unlike industrial structures, or man-made devices, imperfection is an essential part of their beauty and poignancy.
Here, then, is material evidence of the Starns interest in the phenomenological character of the natural world, cast into being against the certitude of our own impermanence. The photographs speak of the fragile delicacy of our ever-warming world while being themselves a visual bulwark against despair, and they draw us, like moths to light, to the pleasures of sight that but for the camera would exceed the human eye.”
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Excerpt from Andy Grundberg’s introduction in alleverythingthatisyou (catalogue published by the Wetterling gallery, Stockholm—Sweden 2007)
