Tone Stockenström
(b.1970 Sweden; resides Chicago, IL)
It is an attempt to understand their experiences of living between two cultures, of being caught in a limbo between the past and the present. - Tone Stockenström
Swedish immigrant Tone Stockenström draws upon her experience and insights from living in the varied cultures of Brazil, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the United States to create photographs that explore immigration and cultural identity. Since 1999 she has addressed those issues through a project centered around the Mexican-American Castaneda family. Photographs of family members, the relationships among them, and the tokens and keepsakes that reveal their identities chronicle the lives of single-mother Otilia and her three children, Lissette, Diana, and German. Stockenström plays on the duality of cultures, the tension or melding of their juxtaposition, by printing many of her photographs in pairs, such that two adjacent frames of a 35mm film roll become both diptych and panorama.
Stockenström earned her BA in Latin American - Iberian Studies and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1993), and her MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago (2002). Recently awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Stockenström is also the recipient of The Polaroid Foundation Artist Support Grant, Canon Emerging Professional Award, and a three-time winner of The Albert P. Weisman Grant. Her exhibitions include A Portrait of a Family at The Water Tower Gallery, Chicago; The Picolino Circus Project at Calumet Photo, Chicago, and Photo Marketing Association, Orlando, Florida; America: First People, New People, Forgotten People at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, Oregon, and the University of St. Francis, Joliet, Illinois; and Here Is New York by New York at Soho, New York, and the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago. Her work has been published in Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, Hope Magazine, Time Out NY, Streetwise - Chicago, The Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Doubletake magazine, and American Photo.
