Evans Contemporary is pleased to present Nothing Beside Remains, an exhibition by Philadelphia based photographer, Tasha Doremus.   

​

 

​Doremus' fascination lies with the physical manifestations of human life as well as the scars of our actions. She views these wounds as the results of myopic and amnesic systems and looks to the world around her to find remnants of civilization, altered and reconfigured cities revealing fractured relics, and the waste which haunts the most remote places of the world. Forgotten, but still perceptible, these images become isolated markers of life, ghosts of experience, both transient and permanent, leaving their traces wherever we look.

 

At the root of these systems, Doremus uncovers images that ultimately speak of memory - the effort of remembering and the consequences of forgetting. She states, "whether painful or tender, real or fabricated, memory quivers at the heart of everything around us, be it a stone, a bird, a house or a human being."

 

In the exhibition Nothing Beside Remains, Doremus' subjects have already been forgotten: gnarled trees, dead animals, abandoned clothes, a blighted neighborhood, a desert people. The intensity of memory seems to reverberate everywhere. A lone tree, somewhere in the Sahara collects wind-blown litter like some kind of dream catcher, while an abandoned store sitting on a hill in a Saharawi refugee camp becomes an emblem of tenacity in the face of stagnation and despair. The house-ghost reveals the intimate space of long gone strangers and everywhere there is the mysterious and singular abandoned shoe. There are even tinier, more insignificant things: a dead bee, a mouse fetus - subjects which Doremus feels she can have immediate control over, can find a guilty solace in, and offers them a place to rest in peace.

 

 

 

Tasha Doremus was born in Britain to Anglo-American parents and spent her early childhood in Japan. Educated in the field of Archaeology, she has worked as a freelance excavator and illustrator for archaeological institutions in Britain, Bulgaria and Turkey. Her detailed illustrations have been published in numerous textbooks and archaeology journals. In the early 1990's Doremus moved to the U.S and made art her vehicle for engaging in a more thorough exploration of contemporary life. Doremus taught herself photography while employed in a variety of occupations which included ranching in Wyoming, fire fighting in Oregon and Utah forests and pulling espressos in Seattle. Since 2001, Doremus has been living in Philadelphia and working in the photography department of the University of Pennsylvania.

​

Her numerous solo and group exhibitions have been featured in such venues as the Philadelphia Centre for the Photographic Image, Rayko Gallery, San Francisco, The Photographic Centre North West, Seattle, The Queens Dock Place, Liverpool, UK, the Philomathean Society at the University of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. She was a member of Philadelphia's Nexus Foundation from 2006 to 2010. Doremus has been artist in residence at Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain, ARTifariti in the Western Sahara and AiR Raumars in Finland.

​

Doremus holds an Honors BA in Ancient and Medieval Archaeology and History from Liverpool University in the UK.

​

​

Nothing Beside Remains is presented in conjunction with Peterborough's SPARK Photo Festival.