As a youth, Charleston visual artist Kirsten Hoving loved to draw, especially the elaborate hairdos in the Breck shampoo ads in Teen magazine.
“I wasn’t very good at drawing them, but that got me going,” she said with a smile.
After earning a doctorate in art history, Hoving taught modern art history, history of photography and other contemporary fields at Middlebury College in Vermont for 36 years before retiring in 2019 to the Lowcountry to be close to her grandchildren. She recently received recognition in the fine art publication Lenscratch.
Charleston-based artist Kirsten Hoving grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia before a long career as a professor of art history at Middlebury College in Vermont.
These days you can find her fashioning photo-based multimedia designs in her studio space in Redux Contemporary Art Center, a haven in Charleston’s vibrant arts community. She has an upcoming exhibit at Redux entitled “Wanderings in the Mermaid’s Palace,” exhibiting Aug. 30-Oct. 18.
The pieces on display are 3D shadowboxes with an image on translucent silk mounted over a second paper photograph nestled inside. Each artwork is a diptych, or a pair of images, encouraging viewers to watch a story unfold between the two. “Wanderings” depicts a veiled world where life under the sea spills into human habitations.
“Redux is where it all happens,” Hoving told The Post and Courier. “Once I get a body of work, I’m back here in my studio turning it into something else. I’m not a photographer that just pushes the button and then makes a print.”
Her artworks transmute technical processes with imagination, expanding on what makes a photograph a photograph. Her work is an amalgam of dimensions, richly layered and diverse in subject matter.
“I’m really interested in the idea of photos as objects,” Hoving said.
This fascination with nontraditional ways of presenting photos goes back to her days of learning historic photographic processes, such as tintype and daguerreotype, which render detailed images on coated metal sheets, and albumen printing, which renders a softer image with less contrast on uncoated paper.
