Ampersand is pleased to present 1979, Tarrah Krajnak's second solo exhibition at the gallery.1979, features large-scale, complexly layered photographic works that draw from intense periods of research and collection in Lima, Peru. The focus is on her own intimate relationship to the turbulent history of the city during 1979, a year of seismic changes. Krajnak writes that, with increasing violence and instability in Peru’s provinces, Lima’s “population swelled and was transformed by a massive influx of rural migrants from the highlands and eastern jungles; my birth mother was among them, one of many young women uprooted during that tectonic demographic shift. That’s almost all I know about her. Like her peers, she was vulnerable in a city that was a violent, dangerous place. 1979 was a year that created orphans.”

1979 is at once highly conceptual and deeply personal, pulling together archival materials, photographs and images culled from pornographic and political magazines in an effort to retrace, reclaim and reinvent something like a psychic history of that difficult year, and, as she writes, to “locate myself within it.” The results are not archival so much as counter-archival, a fractured atlas of collage, high-keyed abstraction, found light and broken glass.

Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at: Art13 London, Art Basel Miami, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Center for Photography Woodstock, San Francisco Camerawork, Newspace Center for Photography, Columbus Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and metropcs gallery in LA among others. She received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Vermont Council for the Arts, The Vermont Community Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared in both print and online magazines including Nueva Luz, Camerawork, F-Stop Magazine, and Killing the Buddha. Krajnak is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Pitzer College. She taught previously at Cornell University and the University of Vermont.

Genocida, 2014
Pigment print
36 x 24 in.
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
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