Ampersand is pleased to present South Sound, an exhibition of photographs by Los Angeles artist Tarrah Krajnak. The show coincides with her new publication, also titled South Sound. Designed and published by Ampersand, the book is offered in an edition of 100. 15 deluxe copies include a signed 11 x 14 in. pigment print from the series.

“The series South Sound,” writes Krajnak, “was made this past winter while I was living and working out of a small family cabin built in 1954 on Puget Sound. The cabin is full of family belongings including: piles of old books, records, paintings, drawings, boxes of old photographs, journals, dream diaries and an impressive collection of strange and meaningful objects, including old masks, broken instruments, stones, feathers, primitive figurines, clay bowls and fetishes. One night I happened to pick up a copy of Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung's last major work before he died), and then I immediately remembered a strange photograph I found in a shoe box under the bed which featured a priest next to an African woman in a green dress. My initial instinct was to juxtapose the photo and the book to see what would happen. From this initial act, South Sound was born. I think of this first image as the key to understanding the rest of the series, as it features Jung's book Mysterium Coniunctionis, which is an inquiry into the separation and alchemical synthesis of psychic opposites. The juxtapositions in the final images are meant to be suggestive rather than expository, relying on the formal and material qualities of the objects within them, as well as their mysterious textual and photographic contents, in order to elicit responses in the viewer that range from synthetic story-making to mute, impassable aporia.”

Alexander Keefe, whose grandfather built the cabin, writes in the essay that accompanies the book, "Some of the photographs in this book are of close relatives – my mother and her siblings, my grandparents – many others are of strangers, and Tarrah's knowledge of the people and places in them is even more limited than my own. And yet I am still surprised by how deeply some of the conjunctions she put together resonate, how painfully too. But the idea was never to narrate the story of my family using photographs and books – it was more about the way we felt at the cabin, about what Tarrah was able to do with the materials she had at hand, the results of an alchemical experiment she ran in my grandfather's strange laboratory. Without much context they manage the limited universality of a speculative riddle; burdened with biblio-biographical detail they forfeit the powerful simplicity of their premise: a photo on a book on a table.”

Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She received an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at such venues as Art13 London, Art Basel Miami, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Center for Photography Woodstock, San Francisco Camerawork, the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. She was the recipient of grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Vermont Council for the Arts, The Vermont Community Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Krajnak recently completed residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha and at Gehe8 in Dresden, Germany. This year Krajnak received the PhotoLucida Scholarship, as well as a nomination for the 2013 Brink Award. Her work has appeared in both print and online magazines including Nueva Luz, Camerawork, F-Stop Magazine and Killing the Buddha. Krajnak is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Pitzer College. She lives and works between Lima, Peru and Los Angeles.