Too Tired | Kelly Burgess with Tara Wray, Billy Buck, Alice Jankovic, Harlan Chrichton and Troy Colby

Join us on Saturday May 15th at 5pm Eastern to hear from Kelly Burgess, Tara Wray and Too Tired Press.

Griffin Museum Members are FREE for this event. Non Members $10. Not a member yet? See what the Griffin has to offer its members on our Members Community page.

Too Tired Press is an independent photo book press based in Woodstock, VT. Our publisher, Kelly Burgess, will speak about how the press was formed as an arm of the Too Tired Project, how their platform is based on transparency and creating an equitable relationship between artists and publisher, and answering any questions about their process. We will also be sharing work from our current and upcoming titles by artists Tara Wray, Billy Buck, Alice Jankovic, Harlan Crichton, and Troy Colby.

Follow Too Tired on Instagram @tootiredproject

About the panelists 

Kelly Burgess

Kelly Burgess (b. 1986, she/her) is a project-based conceptual photographer and curator living and working in rural Vermont. She received her MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2018, where she self-published her thesis work, Sing Me Back Home. Emotional narrative is the thematic thread running through her work, with much of her photography and writing coming directly from personal experiences. She is currently working on her second book, which is a photo and text-based narrative examining solitude and growth. Kelly’s photos have been featured in the New York Times, Kodachrome Magazine, and in various exhibitions and publications worldwide. In addition to her photography work, she is the Gallery Coordinator for the Castleton University Art Galleries and is the Executive Director & Publisher for the Too Tired Project/Too Tired Press. 

Follow her on Instagram  @kellyburgess

Tara Wray

Tara Wray is a photographer, filmmaker, and founder of the Too Tired Project, a non-profit arts organization committed to using photography as a tool to help those struggling with depression and related mental health issues by offering a space for collective creative expression. Her personal work is autobiographical in nature and focuses on issues of mental health and the ambivalence of family ties. And dogs. She makes art to understand the world around her and to define her place within it. 

Her most recent photo book is “Year of the Beast,” published by Too Tired Press in 2021. Other books include “Too Tired for Sunshine” (Yoffy Press, 2018), “El Dorado Freddy’s” (Belt Publishing, 2020, a collaboration with writer Danny Caine), as well as the limited run artist books “Come Again When You Can’t Stay So Long” and “Each One Wonderful,” about New York City dogs.

Recent and solo exhibitions of “Too Tired for Sunshine” were held at Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY and Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN. Selections from “Too Tired for Sunshine” were featured in the group exhibition How to Live and Survive in the Countryside at Museum Hundertwasser in Vienna, Austria, as part of the inaugural FOTO WIEN festival. 

Follow her on Instagram @tara_wray

Wray is co-founder of Too Tired Press. She lives and works in rural Vermont.

Billy Buck 

Billy Buck was born in Northridge, CA and was raised in suburban Illinois. He attended SAIC from 2008-2012, and received his BFA in photography. He currently lives and works on the west coast; investigating anticipation and anxiety by constructing surreal and sometimes bizarre photographs of objects and people that are often commonplace; revealing imagery that entices the senses as much as it repulses them. The ultimate aim of his work is to enchant seemingly banal surroundings, objects and people with his camera — to elicit an emotionally ambiguous energy, oscillating between the warmth of pure joy and the cold emptiness of despair.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally with, Field Projects (New York, NY), Selenas Mountain (formerly, Mountain Gallery) (Brooklyn, NY),  Make-Space at MDW Art Fair, MANA Contemporary (Chicago, IL), The Coat Check (Chicago, IL) Nextart Gallery (Gothenburg, Sweden), AWA Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands), VAULT Gallery (Jacksonville, FL), Signal Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Arcade Cardiff (Cardiff, Wales).

See his work on Instagram @buckminsterbuck

Alice Jankovic

Born in Genoa, Liguria, Alice is a photographer specializing in portraits and storytelling, currently based in Milan and Genoa. Alice attended two years of the Academy of Fine Arts in Visual Arts and Art Didactics in Venice and Genoa and later graduated from the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan. She loves art and creativity in all their forms with a particular interest in anthropology and nature.

Alice tells stories through photography, putting together a fascination for fairy tales, a desire to travel, and a desire for anthropological investigation; well now she illuminates everything with a strong but diaphanous northern light. He selects only small, very precise portions of space and turns everything into black and white. Done?

Do you feel, now, in the birch veins?

Find her on Instagram @alicejankovicphoto

Harlan Crichton

Harlan Crichton was born in Maine in 1990. He was raised in a community of artists in rural Waldo County. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from Maine College of Art in 2012. After graduating from undergrad, Crichton traveled 13,000 miles through rural American via motorcycle photographing strangers and their towns. Crichton received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in photography in 2020. He now lives in Portland, Maine. His work focuses on scientific experimentation, personal narrative, optical illusions, local legends, cycles of time and the extremes of the human experience.

Follow Harlan on Instagram @harlaaaaaan

Troy Colby

Troy was born in rural Kansas in 1975 and currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas. His work and research explores the delicate balance of family, fatherhood, and the outcome of the family photo album. Motivated by intellectual and psychological inquiry of these intimate topics, Troy photographs his own family as a means of understanding the emotional qualities that come along with fatherhood. It has become his means of understanding while creating an honest interpretation of the idealized family album.

He received his BFA from the Academy of Art University in 2015 and his MFA in 2019. His work has been seen in Black and White Magazine, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, Plates to Pixels, The Photo Review, Fraction Magazine, Der Greif, and Fotoroom. Troy is currently an adjunct professor of photography at Kansas State University.

Follow Troy on Instagram @troycolby