Somersault
Raymond Meeks

Somersault
Raymond Meeks
MACK
English

Designed with Adam Meeks.

Hardcover
72 Pages
170 x 254 mm
2021
ISBN 9781913620400

‘We live our lives in widening circles, rarely appreciating their nature and how they bring us back. In a year, my daughter will be leaving home and is no stranger to a similar wanderlust I once knew. As a father, I always felt it was important to instill a profound sense of place, to identify with a certain place as home, even as these ideals have, over recent years, taken on relative meaning. I photograph close to home as memory loses structure, its architecture, trying to make light speak from the fixed edges of rooms long vanished.’ – Raymond Meeks

Inspired by his daughter’s entrance into adulthood and her imminent departure from home, Raymond Meeks studies the centrifugal forces of the places we live – how they anchor us, repel us, and return to us – through scenes that appear both fragile and immovable. In these photographs, gardens give way to thicket, houses are suspended on stacked railroad ties, and telephone wires and train lines suggest the networks we build to find our way through the world’s wilderness.

Among these domestic landscapes are portraits of Meeks’ daughter, which capture the introspection and inquisitiveness of early adulthood while paying tribute to the ultimate mystery of their subject’s consciousness. Following the success of Meeks’ previous book, ciprian honey cathedral, Somersault is a concise, poetic reflection on home and the ties that bind us to it — all the stronger as they fade into the half-light.
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/somersault-br-raymond-meeks)

About the Artist
Raymond Meeks (b. 1963, Ohio) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence.  His books have been described as a field or vertical plane for examining interior co-existences, as life moves in circles and moments and events—often years apart—unravel and overlap, informing new meanings.

Raymond Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York).  His work is represented in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bibliotheque Nationale, France, and the George Eastman House, with recent solo exhibitions at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco and Wouter van Leeuwen in Amsterdam.  Raymond Meeks is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. He will be mentored by David Campany, artistic director of the ICP, and will carry out his residency in France in 2022.

Raymond Meeks is a 2020 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography.
raymondmeeks.com
(source http://www.raymondmeeks.com/bio)