Carol Flax is an artist and educator living in Southern California. Her work using new digital technologies focuses on issues of identity and access to information in both the private and public realms. Her most recent project, Some (M)Other Stories: A Parent(hetic)al Tale addresses issues of her own adoption along with the larger societal implications of how women are viewed in our culture. This multi-faceted project includes a number of large scale Iris ink jet prints, a book published by the Southeast Museum of Photography and produced at Visual Studies Workshop, and a piece on the World Wide Web www.arts.ucsb.edu/~cf2/ which continues to examine these issues and expands the dialog by placing it into the larger public context of the internet. Additional aspects of this project include an installation, collaborative community based project and CD-ROM begun in residence at Banff Centre for the Arts during the winter of 1996.

Carol has completed a number of public art projects in recent years, including a 1993 installation in the Scottish Highlands which looks at the resurgence of the indigenous culture and language of the people of the Highlands. Her six week residency resulted in eighteen, digitally produced, double sided banners installed in the Inverness Train Station as part of Fotofeis, the Scottish International Festival of Photography. Exhibitions include Digital Photography, at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, a 1995 solo exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork, P.L.A.N at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Iterations:The New Image at the International Center for Photography in New York with an accompanying book published by ICP and MIT press.

Carol has an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She currently teaches Electronic Media in the Art Studio Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Artist's Statement:

For years I've been looking at the spaces between...particularly the border between knowledge and ignorance, and metaphorically.... between life and death.

Not knowing is akin to a death. Being deprived of the very essential information of one's genetic code is to lack a piece of life. As an adoptee, I've spent most of my life without. And hence I've looked at what we know and don't know, how we slip between the spaces of knowing, the spaces of life....and death.

In using technology as the tools of my work, I've looked at the metaphors with what I do and how I do it. The in-between spaces as we enter the virtual realm, the realm without embodiment, a realm that might look like death. And a realm that mirrors my own experience of being without genesis, being without kin, being without knowledge.

These spaces exist everywhere we tread. They are between the virtual and the real, the known and the unknown, between life and death. And as we penetrate the spaces in-between, as we perceive the shadows, as we listen to the unsaid, even read between the lines, we begin to understand.