A Crack in the World

A Crack In The World presents Barbara Kyne's photographs of the five acres which she and her partner share in Mariposa, California. Kyne photographs as a means of looking for clues to so-¬called reality, wondering what is outside of the environment that she can detect with her own limited human biology-ultimately producing a photography of nature that does not rely on the nature genre or even on the subject matter of nature for engagement or visual enjoyment, but instead examines the possibilities in the unsensed and imagined. A Crack In The World contains fresh and elegant, yet layered and technically complex, photographs made with the intention of inspiring empathy for all beings and the planet that sustains us. Essay by Susan Griffin examines the artistic and theoretical implications of this deceptively simple body of work.

Barbara Kyne is an artist based in Oakland, California. Her work has been shown at SF Camerawork, Photo Center NW, the Trition Museum of Art, The Kala Institute, and the Bedford Gallery, and is featured in many contemporary photography books and publications.

Barbara Kyne
Barbara Kyne is an artist based in Oakland, California. Her work has been shown at SF Camerawork, Photo Center NW, the Trition Museum of Art, The Kala Institute, the Bedford Gallery and is featured in many contemporary photography books and publications.

Barbara is known for her work creating portraits of art world figures as a contributing columnist for Artweek and has taught photography and art extensively at the City College of San Francisco. She earned her BA in Photography from Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, CA and received an MA in Studio Arts from the Graduate School for the Study of Human Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA.

Susan Griffin
Over fifty years, through twenty books, one a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Griffin has been making unconventional connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Whether pairing ecology and gender in her foundational work Woman and Nature or the private life with the targeting of civilians, in A Chorus of Stones, she sheds a new light on many contemporary issues, including climate change, war, colonialism, the body, democracy, and terrorism. An Emmy award winning playwright and a poet, celebrated for her innovative style, her books are also works of literature. Woman and Nature, is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones: the Private Life of War, blends history and memoir as does What her Body Thought, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: the Autobiography of an American Citizen, all of which belong to a series she calls ＂a social autobiography.＂ The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues, while rendering a radically new interpretation of an erotic tradition, engages in parody by inverting common moralistic judgments against women’s sexuality into virtues. Among her many awards and honors, she has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Northern California Book Award for non-fiction, an honorary doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Commonwealth Silver Award for Poetry. A Chorus of Stones was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Northern California Book Award, and her play ＂Voices＂ was given a local Emmy. Griffin has also contributed a number of essays to anthologies including a collection that, along with psychologist Karin Carrington, she edited for UC Press, titled Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, with contributions by authors from over 24 countries, that offers a new paradigm for moving the world beyond violence as the first, and often only, response to violence. In 2012, this collection was given the prestigious Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is currently completing a novel, called The Ice Dancer’s Tale, and a long poem about the Mississippi River.

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War and the holocaust, these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she spent as a child in the High Sierras and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness of the earth and ecology. As she draws connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both private and public life, Griffin’s work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception. Susan lives in Berkeley, CA.