Sandra Klein
Sandra Klein’s self-portraits show very little of her physical appearance beyond a nearly transparent silhouette, but she shows, in full color and character, the details of her inner life, her thoughts, dreams, and the whirl of activity in her ‘noisy brain.’ With deftest use of digital tools, she cuts her head in half, top to bottom, and shows both the biological details revealed by the operation and the symbolic contents of her memory and imagination. Her work considers gender, aging, creativity, heredity, and all the other personal and social impacts on her development as an individual and on the development of the “universal mind” as well.
"I was lucky enough to accompany my husband on his work trips to Japan during the last seven winters. I love Japan for so many reasons. Especially important to me is that in Japan I was inspired to find a way to shoot “straight” photography. For the past 10 years or so, I have mostly composited images, but in Japan I began shooting layered images “in camera.” I love the colors of the landscape in winter and shooting in snowstorms. I’ve loved learning about Buddhism and Shintoism and the rituals of the Japanese. Their arts and crafts and textiles have also been really important for my imagery. I recently became interested in Kintsugi, the repair of ceramics with lacquer and gold leaf and have used the concept in my Grieving in Japan series. This past February, I took a class in Kintsugi in Tokyo with a master artisan, a highlight of my time there."