TARRAH KRAJNAK
A portfolio of my current and recent photographic projects.
SISTERS OF THE SACRED HEART
I was born in Peru in 1979 in an orphanage run by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Soon afterwards, I was adopted and grew up in Ohio. In 2008, I returned to Peru for the first time and went, with hesitation, to visit the orphanage. To my surprise, the now-elderly Sister Teres emerged and, recognizing me at once, greeted me warmly. She had with her several old photos of me and my family in Ohio. My great Aunt, also a Sacred Heart Sister, who died several years before, had been sending her pictures of our family for close to 20 years. Sister Teres had saved these photos in meticulously archived albums, along with those of other adopted children. In 2008, I was unprepared to take photographs, but I remained fascinated by these women and, in particular, their own informal uses of the photograph as a means of remembrance and correspondence. After returning to the US, I began this documentary project at a small convent in Reading, PA where some of the nuns retire. I will be living and working abroad this year to photograph the nuns working in Peru, India, and Korea.
AFTER CHAMBI
“In this exhibition Peruvian-born, Midwest-raised artist Tarrah Krajnak, examines the function of the photograph in the authentication of origins, identity, and the experiential. Appropriating Martin Chambi’s work, Krajnak juxtaposes object and image by projecting the pictures onto sculptural paper bodies and distorting them by way of re-photographing. After Chambi plays with and challenges the role photography plays as a historical and characterization tool; questioning how we learn about other ethnicities via archives and how we personally and culturally derive meaning from photographs.” –Curatorial Statement, Firehouse Center, 2010
CODEPENDENT OBJECTS (IN COLOR)
Ongoing collaboration between Nancy Dwyer and Tarrah Krajnak. They are interested in the language of objects and the relationship between photography and sculpture.
CODEPENDENT OBJECTS (SITUATIONS)
Ongoing collaboration between Nancy Dwyer and Tarrah Krajnak. They are interested in the language of objects and the relationship between photography and sculpture.
TARRAH&WILKA COLLABORATIVE WORKS
2005-2009
Tarrah and Wilka’s images invite the viewer to assess, not merely consume, the motifs recurring in contemporary art, its framework, and its presentation. Lending a new twist to role-playing photography, a style in which the photographer performs as, or directs the performance of, her subject for the camera, they explore intimacy, voyeurism, rivalry, social roles and the construction of the female persona while blurring the boundaries between staged and documentary photography and exploring the relationship between self-presentation and the camera.
This is a small sampling of an extensive 4 year project comprised of hundreds of photographs ordered into several interrelated bodies of work. The work relies on the language of the archive and uses repetition and multiplicity to convey meaning. To view the entire project please visit:
SUITE42
Suite42 is a collaborative founded in 2009 by Tarrah Krajnak and Danielle Julian-Norton. Their collaborative performance based projects explore the struggle of the artist within a contemporary context and the process of collaboration itself. To see the entire project please visit:
