This Room Will Survive Me
This Room Will Survive Me
ARTIST STATEMENT
A room— any structure within, between and surrounding buildings and the natural environment, functions as metaphor in “This Room Will Survive Me”. Here, the room is a a concept of architecture incorporating time, solitude and the ongoing search for belonging. Through a pandemic and hundreds of self-portraits created in hollows of landscapes, abandoned dwellings and passageways between rooms of homes on instant prints and rare, expired film I discover a consideration of architecture well beyond engineering and design. With direct light flooding my body and obsolete instant camera with expired film camera in long exposures, the architecture of a room not only contains me but provides an extension of my being in the world. I experience architectural terrain of present moment and distant past simultaneously as corollaries of identity. Closets and furniture drawers house memory itself. I am conscious of shapes and feelings of snow forts, garden plots and mud holes in my childhood alongside present senses of touch on windowsills, doorknobs and forest leaves. The room persists as any room I’ve ever inhabited, housing relationships and words spoken in all rooms I’ve ever occupied. Its intimate contours unite me with nature beyond walls. The images in “This Room Will Survive Me” merge the reality of a room and an external world beyond it in an “oceanic feeling” of wholeness—a sensation of
eternity*.
Cindy Konits 2022
“Konits marks a new direction in photography, . . . a kind of ‘existential documentary’.”
— Borbala Jasz, Professor of Philosophy, Art and Architecture,
Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
*Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 1929.