JUSTIN CARNEY - EXPOSURE INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL

and the disappearing has become questions what it means when one’s memories fade after the death of a loved one and how this forgetting affects a person. After witnessing my grandmother’s death in our house, it became clear how temporary life is and how quickly memories fade without one’s control. I’ve forgotten many aspects about my grandmother, and there is a fear one day it will be my family’s faces, their laugh, and how it felt to be next to them that will be forgotten. What will become of me when they pass, and I am the one left behind?

and the disappearing has become uses photography, mono-printing techniques, and erasing with sandpaper to embody the process of forgetting. This process being one where memories overlap, become obscured, and buried. The gestural act of sanding and painting works to claim this unconscious process of forgetting as an innate part of life rather than as something harmful. Although bodies and memories dissolve, the ones we love will forever remain etched into the fabric of our being. Form may change but it does not disappear.

The work that I share is grief work, it is mourning, it is the healing process. I share this project as a gesture of seeing each other. By seeing how others go through similar things, one feels less alone in grief. Through sharing my own struggles to cope with my family’s death, the photographs open a door for conversation about death and healing.

BIOGRAPHY

Justin A. Carney is an artist and educator that uses autobiographical photography to question how death and grief affect familial connections—the bonds that keep a family together and cause them to separate, and how grief shapes an individual. Much of Carney’s artistic practice deals with confronting and exposing grief surrounding death to create an avenue for not only himself but also for others to find healing and cope with the deaths in their lives.

Carney is originally from Baltimore, Maryland, and currently teaches at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis. He received his MFA in Photography at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a BFA in Photography from Pennsylvania College of Art &. Design. He is the recipient of the Bloomington Arts Commission 2022 Emerging Artist Grant. He has been awarded the First Place Single Image Award from LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2023. Carney’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.