Artist Statement
I’m in the process of a body of work that has no end in sight. What We Conjure is an autobiographical story, a contemporary folk tale, one that I’m creating along with my partner, our five-year old and our dog.??The work consists of pictures that are made while tracking and documenting, collaboratively inventing and constructing. I follow intuition, daydreams, our daughter’s instruction, or carefully sketched out ideas; and I set them before a large format view camera. Using an 8 x 10 inch film camera connects me directly to the history of photography, and specifically, to a history of the family photograph. It’s a process I’ve come to love regardless of how counter-intuitive it may seem amid today’s picture making technology. The view camera’s fidelity and rendering of tone is unrivaled, and its presence with a sitter creates a performance, its own unique drama.?
In What We Conjure, I am also working through ideas of fatherhood, and occasionally appear on the other side of my lens, implicated in the story we weave. There was a point when I found myself wandering, looking for a photograph, with fingers crossed. When I became a parent I felt an urge to tell stories and so set out to make a fable for my daughter. Along the way, reality has leaked into our myth. We are on a search for the significant, the magic in every day. What will we find that’s worth passing down? What will we conjure?
Scott Alario was born in New Haven, CT in 1983 and currently lives and works between Providence, RI, and Alfred, NY. He received his MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. His work has been included in group exhibitions internationally, including at Louis B. James, NY, 2013-14, and ClampArt, NY, 2013.In 2011 Alario was named one of seven emerging photographers to watch by Art New England. He is the recipient of a 2012 Fellowship Merit Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He is represented by Kristen Lorello, New York.
Alario's recent series "What We Conjure" includes staged depictions of his immediate family and their surroundings, photographed over the course of two years in Rhode Island and Maine. Using a large format 8 x 10 view camera, Alario employs devices such as multiple exposure and blurring to lend a surreal quality to everyday scenes. For example, in In Sagittarius (above), Alario photographed both the North Star and his daughter, Elska, from various angles, exposing the film to multiple takes to create the illusion of a disappearing figure beneath a cluster of stars.