Robbennolt, Linda

For many years, Linda Robbennolt has been working with the combination of painting and photography to explore the boundaries between dialectic concepts like reality and illusion, dimension and flatness, humor and sorrow. Winter Kill is part of this larger body of work comprised of approximately 150 pieces and created over the span of a decade. Here, the scene is orchestrated in recognition–perhaps even acceptance–of life’s inherent cruelty. Winter Kill is clearly a constructed image, a carefully crafted planar illusion, and it is worth noting that the manipulation is staged for the camera and not created in the darkroom. The original photograph of Winter Kill was shot in the 20x24 Polaroid studio in New York City, while the final image is a silver dye bleach print.

Linda Robbennolt was born in White Plains, New York in November of 1951. In 1973, she received her BA degree in communications from the University of South Dakota and her MFA degree in photography from the University of Oklahoma in 1982. She is the recipient of Polaroid 20x24 Studio Grants in 1987, 1988, and 1990; an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in 1994; a Ferguson Grant from Friends of Photography, Carmel, California in 1985; and a National Endowment for the Arts/Mid America Artists Alliance grant in 1984. Her work has been exhibited extensively and internationally; the Museum of Contemporary Photography alone has exhibited her work in Illinois Photographers Project (1998); Illinois Photographers In the 90s (1997); and Linda Robbennolt (1991). Her work is also included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; Centro Colombo Americano, Colombia; and Polaroid Corporation in Offenbach, Germany. Robbennolt is an Associate Professor in photography at the University of Illinois, Champaign.