THE CHILDREN
In The Children, collaborative artists Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky explore the ephemeral nature of childhood with a tough and tender immediacy, fixed by harsh flash, deep shadows and a pointed use of primary colour.
The Children shows us a world at once familiar and strange, where the more vulnerable aspects of youth are explored in a manner recalling the crime scene photography of the Speed-Graphic era or Technicolor film noir. The children in these images inhabit a remote institutional setting and are enveloped by an untamed natural world.
At times radiating innocence and joy, the images also suggest trauma. By limiting the factual origins of each photograph, Cassidy and Shatzky present an atmosphere in which the melancholy dislocation of these children reach us as if by way of dream logic. Within this abstract narrative context, the viewer is encouraged to reflect upon these boys and girls, not as documentary subjects, but rather as apparitions or symbols from our own fragile childhood, as if recollected through the darkened pathways of memory.
