MARGO HALVERSON
IF I HAD KNOWN
OCTOBER 25, 2018 – JANUARY 27, 2019
Margo Halverson, Sideline Vigilance #891 from the series If I had Known, 2018, archival inkjet print, 26 x 29 inches
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Moments are up for grabs. It is time that I look curiously at to recognize loss and simultaneously become lost. Peripheral vision surprises me; it is the nature of noticing, of crossing onto the hardwood from the rug, stepping over the threshold and seeing paw prints on snow through the screen door. I photograph because the images meet my curiosity halfway. Halfway between intrigue and simple witnessing, halfway between time being and being. These glimpses, taken with an iPhone always in my pocket, remind me I was there facing front, I was awake, it is all fragile, it is beautiful and never too much.”
IF I HAD KNOWN CHAPTERS INCLUDE:
If I had Known (too)
Side Longings
Moments of Contingency
Sited Snippets
Sideline Vigilance
On Notice
BIOGRAPHY
In her decades-spanning photography practice, Margo Halverson has been fascinated with making images that capture peripheral moments that refer to home and times’ obsolescence. She is internationally renown for teaching the creative process and for giving meaning form with words and image—which, in a photography book workshop in the eighties she was told, ‘that’s called graphic design’.
She is creative director and partner of Alice Design, (alicedesign.com) 1983–present; cofounder of the vanguard educational non-profit organization, DesignInquiry (designinquiry.net) 2002–present, whose mission is to cultivate the collective goal of extra-disciplinary discourse, productive counter-production, and research of design; and Professor of graphic design at Maine College of Art, 1990–present. Margo earned her BFA and MFA in Photography from Arizona State University in early eighties when the tenor was New Topographics. Since abandoning her 4x5 camera for the iPhone, she photographs unceasingly (margohalverson.com), all the while designing in collaboration with inspired artists and museums, helping other creative professionals establish a visual voice, teaching, and calling the dog in. She is a native of Forest River, North Dakota and by way of the southwest, Margo made teaching in Portland, Maine, a way of life while raising a family, happily skipping the beach in summer, and most recently since both kids are in college, learning to fence.