Apr. 17, 2010 at 10:00pm
Wijnanda Deroo, ‘Columbia Hotel’, 2005. Deroo’s photographs are much more about absence than presence, and her Sharon Springs series has this poignantly haunted quality.  These images not only evoke the ‘ghost town’ character of the locale, but also the uncanny ghostliness of photography.  The unsettling (but wonderful) thing about this photograph in particular is that it actually reminds me of a dream I once had as a child, one in which I wandered around a deserted, somehow familiar church.  I remember the dream because shortly afterwards, I went with a friend to her church.  It was my first time visiting, but somehow it was eerily similar to the one I had dreamed.  I don’t know that ‘Columbia Hotel’ physically resembles that church, but I think it has a quality of a haunted, strangely familiar dream or déjà vu; there’s the ache of something missing, just out of frame, which seems to be at once returning and disappearing.

Wijnanda Deroo, ‘Columbia Hotel’, 2005.

Deroo’s photographs are much more about absence than presence, and her Sharon Springs series has this poignantly haunted quality.  These images not only evoke the ‘ghost town’ character of the locale, but also the uncanny ghostliness of photography.  The unsettling (but wonderful) thing about this photograph in particular is that it actually reminds me of a dream I once had as a child, one in which I wandered around a deserted, somehow familiar church.  I remember the dream because shortly afterwards, I went with a friend to her church.  It was my first time visiting, but somehow it was eerily similar to the one I had dreamed.  I don’t know that ‘Columbia Hotel’ physically resembles that church, but I think it has a quality of a haunted, strangely familiar dream or déjà vu; there’s the ache of something missing, just out of frame, which seems to be at once returning and disappearing.