2016 2016: CVPA professor’s photography explores ‘second nature’ of domestic spaces

Assistant Professor of Photography Sarah Malakoff to discuss her recent work at ARNIE Talk March 9

In her work as a photographer, UMass Dartmouth College of Visual & Performing Arts (CVPA) Assistant Professor Sarah Malakoff sees a deep connection between the ordinary elements which fill our living spaces and the outside world. Assistant Professor Malakoff examines the juxtaposition of how we fill our interior living spaces with plants, textures, and animals, which in turn evokes a sense of yearning for the exterior and outdoors.

"My photographs are a collection of private spaces that ask the viewer to imagine the people who inhabit them,” Assistant Professor Malakoff wrote about her work. “We see both the unique ways we live behind closed doors, as well as the universal impulse to control and transcend our environment.”

‌‌‌Professor Malakoff will share her lens on domestic spaces fraught with our longing for a deeper connection to the outside world March 9, at 4 p.m. at UMass Dartmouth’s Claire T. Carney Library Robert F. Stoico/FIRSTFED Foundation Grand Reading Room. The ARNIE Talk titled Second Nature shares the same name of the professor’s book published in 2013 which features her large-format photographs of domestic interiors.

Professor Malakoff received her B.A. in Studio Art with a minor in Women's Studies from Smith College in 1994, and her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography, Film and Video 1997. She taught at several institutions in the area before joining the faculty at UMass Dartmouth as full-time lecturer in 2008, and then Assistant Professor in 2012. Her work has been widely exhibited in both solo and group shows nationally and are included in several public and private collections.  

My photographs are a collection of private spaces that ask the viewer to imagine the people who inhabit them.