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Karen Kirchhoff

Artist Statement

As a teenager growing up in northeastern New Jersey, I spent a lot of the eighties hanging out in neighboring Manhattan. I went there for one thing. To see punk and hardcore bands play music. I was in love (for better or worse) with the music, the energy, the politics, the people, and the venues. This shaped who I was then, and continues to inform my life now. While still in New Jersey, I traveled to New York City religiously almost every weekend to see bands, until the age of twenty when I impulsively boarded a Greyhound bus headed to Oakland, California.

Once in the Bay Area I logically found myself involved in the local punk community. Many of the group houses I lived in when I first moved to Oakland became venues for weekend punk shows. This also happened to be when I began taking pictures. When I started photographing I focused my creative attention on making portraits of people I met
through the underground music scene. It was not until recently that I gave closer attention to these images and organized them into a collaborative photographic installation called Not Your Favorite Band. This digital slideshow is compiled of a decade of images of punk people and places taken by photographer and friend, Ivette Spradlin, and myself.

Recently I moved back to the east coast from California. I continue to photograph the punk scene but have redirected my focus away from people to the places they inhabit. For my series In the Basement I am photographing the d.i.y., underground music venues that make up the global punk network. I take large format color photographs of these spaces as they exist on their own, absent of live music, to show each room as its own entity and as a reflection of the people who created it. Through photographing them empty I am revealing what is normally hidden, exposing a specific secret visual language. These venues provide a stage on which the energy, politics, humor, frustrations, and loves of this community are funneled out into the world. Locations are often, but not limited to, the basements of communal or group houses. They may exist for only a show or two or may go on for years. They become physically transformed through the events that take place in them. I see a direct relationship between the often raw, unfinished quality of these spaces, and the music that is created and played in them. I am interested in recording these venues as a tribute to their importance as a vital element in the existence of counter-cultures everywhere.


Curriculum Vitae

Education

2008
M.F.A. candidate, Tyler School of Art

May 1999
Bachelor of Arts (photography), San Francisco State University


Awards

1997
Jules Strauss Scholarship for Photography

1998
Outstanding Student Achievement Award,
San Francisco State University Alumni
Association

2007
Project Completion Grant, Temple University


Exhibitions and Curatorial

2008
Solo Exhibition, Circle of Hope

2007
1st Year Juried M.F.A. Exhibit, Tyler Gallery

2006
Regional Juried Student Snapshot Exhibition,
The Charles Adams Gallery, UPenn
Curated by Zoe Strauss

Voice, Providence Art Club
Curated by Kara Walker

2005
No Spring Chicken, 224 south 44th st., group show

Dalva Photography, Dalva, group show

2004
This is the World as We See It, Needles and Pens, group show

Inside of Inside, The Lab, juried group show

What I Did on My Vacation, In Color 2, group show

2003
Gimme Polaroid, New Langton Arts, group show

SFBC Benefit, SoMarts, group show

Garage Sale, Build, group show

Pretty Gritty, Rayko Photo Center, co-curator, group benefit show

2002
02-02-02, Unified Design Labs, group show

2001
Think Again, Southern Exposure, annual juried show

Element of Temporary 3, Southern Exposure, co-curator, group show

Residual Images, Studio Z Gallery, co-curator, group show

Arts Access Festival, Berkeley City Hall, sponsored by Integrated Arts

1999
Fuzzy Logic, Southern Exposure, annual juried show

101 Uses for a…, Crucible Steele Gallery, juried group show

Element of Temporary 2, Cell Space, co-curator, group show

1998
Element of Temporary, Four Walls Gallery, co-curator, group show

Nothing But Time, Southern Exposure, annual juried show

Post Market, 65 Capp Street, group show

Fictions and Confessions, Magnolia Editions, group show

Stillwell, San Francisco State University, annual juried show