Kirsten Hoving is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist from Charleston, SC, whose art balances on the edge between fact and fiction. Over the last fifteen years, Hoving has shown her work in galleries around the world and has published several books, including Svala’s Saga, a project done in collaboration with photographer Emma Powell. With a PhD in art history from Columbia University, Hoving had a long career as a professor and scholar of modern art, with books and articles on many topics, including Surrealist photography and the assemblages of Joseph Cornell. Those interests inform her creative practice. 

Hoving frequently combines photographs with unusual processes, materials, and presentations to evoke quiet dreams, myths, and half-remembered tales. Using unexpected viewpoints, three-dimensionality, and kinetic elements, she expands photography’s decisive moments into visionary states of mystical wonder. Our imagination, she believes, is what makes us human, and our ability to see the world through metaphors, stories, and poetic allusions connects our minds to our hearts.  

Hoving’s combination of silk fabric with other photographs and materials creates mysterious images that allude to poems, myths, and transcendent experiences. Although her subjects are quietly commonplace – a ladder propped against an apple tree, a figure entering a doorway, a swimmer lifting an arm – she presents them in unusual ways that elevate them to poetic visions. Hoving’smaterials and processes support the metaphors in her work, as silk, whether flowing or three-dimensional, provides the underpinning for imaginative musings and fabricated visions.