A photographic retracing of the fictional steps taken through London by one of novelist Virginia Woolf’s best-known characters, Clarissa Dalloway, is the basis for an upcoming exhibit at Amarillo College’s Southern Light Gallery.
The exhibit, Virginia Woolf Was Here: Mapping Mrs. Dalloway, is the work of Adriane Little, a lens-based conceptual artist/educator from Kalamazoo, Mich.
Her photographs will be on display at AC from Monday, Feb. 24 through Wednesday, April 1. The exhibit is free and open to the public.
Little is an associate professor of photography and intermedia, and she also serves as associate director for the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. Her artwork has received national and international recognition in numerous exhibitions and video screenings.
Since fall 2006, her work has exhibited in 41 different venues in 37 international cities and in 57 different venues in 44 U.S. cities, including 8 in New York City.
Little’s inspiration for Virginia Woolf Was Here: Mapping Mrs. Dalloway, stems from Woolf’s penchant for featuring characters in her novels that reflected her own real-life experience of losing her mother at age 13.
“This loss reappears across her novels,” Little points out in her artist statement. “As an artist, I am interested in studying both her writing and her as a woman who experienced this early and profound loss.
“I walked the streets of London and photographed along the path that Mrs. Dalloway walks in the novel (of the same name). These are the same streets that Woolf herself walked countless times,” Little states.
“My intention was not to illustrate the novel, but instead to use stream of consciousness in capturing the images. This mirrors the literary strategy of the novel.”
Woolf is considered a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative devise.
For more information about the Little exhibit or the Southern Light Gallery, please contact René West, assistant professor of photography and gallery curator, at rwest@actx.edu or 806-345-5654.
-Amarillo College