Artist Talk with Tabitha Soren
Tabitha Soren left a career in television in 1999 for a fellowship at Stanford and that led to the start of a second career as a photo-based artist. Soren’s work speaks to the twists of fate in life that can unhinge us. Whether it’s disquieting images of people in mid-fight or flight in the Running series, or in the tribute to panic attacks in her oceanscape series Panic Beach, Soren is most interested in what human beings can survive – and what they can’t. Her images function like invitations to the viewers’ emotional memory. Her series Surface Tension delves into the human psyche by foregrounding the anxiety we navigate in the struggle to adapt to technological domination. Although baseball is at the center of her series Fantasy Life, the 15-year project is just as much about the mental state of trying to beat the odds and the role of striving in American culture.