Mary Kunaniec Skeen

About the Artist

Mary Kunaniec Skeen, an Affiliate Professor of Photography, graduated from MICA with a BFA in painting and printmaking,and later received an MFA in photography from Towson University.  She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of three Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards and two Faculty Research grants from Loyola University.  

Artist's Statement

My photographs have never been purely representational, but are decontextualized images ,taken from the real world and presented as tabula rasa to the viewer. They are fugitive images—taken on the move, caught in the corner of an eye,never quite there. Rather, they serve to evoke a nostalgia—not as sentimental reflection, but as representations of the pain of longing, or remembrance for things past , or for something lost or never attained. I recently came across a quote from the writer Joan Didion that reflects my thinking. She states ,referring to writers—“We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria ( a sequence of real or imaginary images like those seen in a dream) which is our actual experience. I leave it to the viewer to impose their own narrative upon my imagery.