Anika Steppe (1991) completed her BS in Photography at Ithaca College in 2013 and received her MFA in Studio Art at University of Texas at Austin in 2018. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Steppe explores the medium’s capacity to mediate, not the world as such, but our ever-shifting relationship to it. These photographs do not “capture” places, “arrest” moments; rather, I am the one apprehended, seen, caught amid framings of her and my own creation. This is the work’s great gift. Steppe brings us to the photograph’s edge. A limit, but a false one, delineating an absence we can’t help but fill. It’s boundlessness, and our own, on the line.
—excerpts by Francesca Balboni, on series A Matter of Relationships