EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists

Rhona Bitner

Artist's Website
Inside the Artist's Studio Documentary
Instagram

In his novella “Company,” Samuel Beckett wrote “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” These words led me to consider the symmetry between the camera and the theater. Both are dark boxes through whose apertures—be it the lens or the stage—we try to make sense of the world outside. I choose to make my work by using this parallel as a guide. Staged performance, from classical theater to rock n’ roll, circus, ballet, and everything in between, acts as a laboratory of humanity. Each of my projects refers to an aspect of collective experience within this idea, be it inward or outward, emotional or lived. I hope the viewer can imagine themselves within the memories and references implied in the photographs.

Just as a symphony is conveyed through various instruments, my work is building a “whole” comprised of individual series of photographs. Read together, they become a comprehensive, visual composition, a harmony assembled from different notes and layers, all imagining that voice in the dark.

Rhona Bitner is a native New Yorker. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Rhona Bitner: Resound” will open at the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College in September of 2023. A comprehensive book on her 13-year project LISTEN was published by Rizzoli, New York and Paris, in 2022. Her work is included in public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Ringling Museum of Art and the Wellin Museum. Recently it has been included in exhibitions at The Musee du Louvre, Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain, among others, and published in Artforum, The New Yorker, ArtPress, Rolling Stone, and the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2020.