San Francisco photographer Chris Komater presents a new series of large-scale low-resolution images culled from his family history, Family Album. Ranging in resolution from easily- to barely-recognizable, the images mirror the process of our loved ones disappearing from our lives.
Digital photography and the camera-phone make it possible to document every moment. Prior to the digital image, there was film. For sixty years, Komater’s father meticulously documented the major events in his family’s life with Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides. During reunions his family would spend entire weekends viewing projected slides and reliving the intimate moments they shared.
Following the recent passing of both of his parents, Komater has chosen a few of these images and produced low-resolution enlargements: his mother and father kissing in the back of a car on their wedding day; their first-born toddling by a lake; and young Chris embracing a teddy bear. Komater is asking us to look past the specific content of these images, and to experience the transformations of meaning and memory attached to them.
CHRIS KOMATER is a San Francisco-based artist. His photographs and sound installations have been shown at Cheryl Haines Gallery, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Mark Wolfe Contemporary Arts, Meridian Gallery, and the LAB Gallery in San Francisco; Jan Kesner Gallery in Los Angeles; Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston, and many other venues. He is the recipient of a WESTAF-NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship, a Market Street Art-in-Transit grant, and was the founding director and curator of Secession Gallery, a non-profit gallery without walls in San Francisco, and the online arts venue, Marjorie Wood Gallery. This is Chris’ seventh solo show at the Mercury 20 Gallery.
