Kyra Schmidt
The lumen prints represented here consider ideas of collaboration, community, subjectivity, and collective memory. They are durational sun prints made with various black and white photographic papers. Each image is created through a collaborative meditation between myself and various individuals. Images from the women’s suffrage archive are superimposed onto the final unfixed lumen via a Xerox printer. The economical process merged with the fragility of the paper suggests the ephemerality of our defining moments, while considering how the archive not only curates memory but buries it as well.
Text borrowed from snippets of conversation, archives, and stream-of-conscious thought is embossed into the paper’s surface by hand. The act of mark-making is symbolic of perseverance, recognizing the countless individuals that have and still fight for equality. Merging past with present, their layering evokes obscured remnants of civil and political strife still relevant today. This series of images aims to prioritize universality and mindfulness within a pluralistic society, focusing not on gender or class, but individuality and personal connection.
Born in Indiana, Kyra Schmidt is a visual artist currently based in Roanoke, Virginia. She received her Bachelors at the University of Southern Indiana, and her MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Kyra is the Programs Coordinator at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University. Schmidt’s work follows a historic lineage of landscape photographers, while rejecting traditional methods in favor of experimentation and ephemerality. The artist creates abstract artworks that prioritize the artist’s hand, performance, and the land as central to creating images as evocative suggestions of time and place. Her work attempts to transcribe the space between the sensation of being-in-the-world and our representations of it, often grappling with the discontinuity between image, text, meaning and physical experience.
Kyra has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; The House of Lucie, Los Angelas, CA; Candela Gallery, Richmond, VA; Edition One, Santa Fe, NM; Gallery 621, Tallahassee, FL; the Lushui Photography Festival, Lishui, China. Her work as been published in Aint-Bad Magazine, BETA Developments in Photography, and as a 2017 Top 50 Photographer by Critical Mass. Kyra’s first handmade monograph published with Dust Collective in Fall 2019.
instagram: @kyraschmidt
