Nancy Floyd

Nancy Floyd has been an exhibiting artist for over thirty years. She has received numerous grants and awards including a 2016 CUE Art Foundation Fellowship, a 2015 Society for Photographic Education Future Focus Project Support Grant, and a 2014 John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award. Temple University Press published her first book, She’s Got a Gun, in 2008.

Floyd’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues including Solomon Projects, Atlanta, GA; Flux Projects, Atlanta, GA; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; White Columns, New York, NY; and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA. Since 2009, her work has been part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Archive, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. In 2017 Floyd will have solo exhibitions of her current project, Weathering Time, at Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, and the CUE Art Foundation Gallery in New York City. Gallery representation: Whitespace: http://whitespace814.com/artists/nancy-floyd/.

Floyd holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. She lives in Atlanta, GA.

Weathering Time

I am interested in the aging female body, the passage of time, and loss. I use photography and video to address the ways in which lens-based media can connect deeply with experience and memory.

I have been photographing myself since 1982. If I fail to take a picture the film is advanced so a blank image is recorded, creating a visual calendar. The 2,500+ photographs include my body from head to toe, as well as some of my environment. I am also making digital reenactment photographs to record changes in visually dramatic ways, and at times including old family photos.

For over three decades the photographs show, in fractions of a second, my body standing in an environment (mainly, I’m by myself but sometimes I’m with family and friends) in a straightforward manner for the camera. As time passes, births, deaths, celebrations, and bad days come and go; all the while, the American experience evolves.

It’s not just the body that changes: Fashions and hairstyles evolve; pets come and go; typewriters, analog clocks, and telephones with cords disappear; and finally, film gives way to digital and the computer replaces the darkroom. While Weathering Time is a personal archive, and I am mining the archive to address issues of the female body, the family snapshot and loss, I am also interested in producing images that suggest some of the experiences of my generation. Indeed, the photographs underscore the cultural, technological, and physical changes that have occurred over the past thirty-five years—from my youth to the dawn of my old age.

To view more of their work please visit their website.