Angela Strassheim investigates memory, family, religion, and female identity.
Before turning to art, she completed training as a forensic photographer and took crime scene, evidence, surveillance, and autopsy photographs. This experience is evident in the clinical precision of her current work, which ranges from psychologically fraught, carefully structured images of families, young and teenage girls, and domestic scenes to uncanny pictures of homes in which murders had occurred. A selection of her subtly unsettling images was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Strassheim is inspired by painters, parenting magazines, and news stories, as well as by her own experiences. As she has explained, she photographs “as a way to grapple with the memories of my past that confuse me and have always disturbed my conscience.”
