On Seeing | Amber Crabbe, Melinda Hurst Frye, Sarah Grew & Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband
May 26, 2022
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7:00 pm
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8:30 pm
We are excited to bring back our panel conversations between photographers showcasing the wide range of creativity on a single idea or series. Our online program On Seeing is a monthly conversation bringing together members of the Griffin community to share their work, ideas and creativity with a broader audience. We are thrilled to bring together these artists who have unique perspectives on creativity and the world they inhabit.
This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers here.
This month we are pleased to bring together four artists looking at the landscape and our ever changing, evolving earth. Join us for a great conversation with Amber Crabbe, Melinda Hurst Frye, Sarah Grew and Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband.
Amber Crabbe –
Amber Crabbe holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and received a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2018 she was awarded a position in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Fellows Program and in 2012 she received the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Contemporary Art Award. She has participated in numerous curated and juried exhibitions at venues throughout the U.S., including the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, the Berkeley Art Center, SF Camerawork, SomArts, the Pacific Film Archive, Gallery Route One, Rayko Photo Center, the Smith Anderson North Gallery, the Gray Loft Gallery, and the Whatcom Museum. She lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Melinda Hurst Frye – The Forest Floor
With dirt under my nails, my heart jumps as my hand brushes against a worm in the soil. I am reminded of the world that thrives underground, unsettled by the mystery that is at my fingertips. Analogous to scenes from a natural history museum, flora and fauna take center stage to illustrate that we are always tied to migration, evolution, and metamorphosis. The surface is not a border, but an entrance to homes, nurseries, highways, and graveyards.
As a whole, my work leans toward the ecology of the Pacific Northwest region, with the goals of bearing witness to the cycles of the forest floor, and bridging the poetry of art with biological sciences. Using a flatbed scanner in the field, or photographing cut paper, my work is process-heavy and place-based. I am attracted to making work that takes time, finding the layering of processes necessary in my artistic discovery, and often approaching a chosen space like an amateur biologist; observing, sketching, photographing, and scanning.
Sarah Grew – Portraits of Pacific Plankton
Sarah Grew creates art based in painting and photography, that can expand into installation and environmental art, or contract into collage and printmaking. Her work is held in private collections nationally and internationally, she has also created a number of public art projects. Infused in ideas bridging philosophy, natural science and art history, her art studies ideas of time, light and climate change. To further develop the concepts that enrich her work she has been an artist-in-residence for a philosophical collegium in Italy, become a beekeeper, studied native plant habitats, and been
awarded a residency at a recycling facility in California.
Recently, she was an artist in residence on a science research boat studying the effects of climate change on the plankton food web. Grew has been awarded a Ford Family Foundation Artist Support Grant several times in addition to residencies at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Playa, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Joshua Tree National Park, and the Ucross Foundation. Currently, she is a Jane Stevens King Remote Artist in Residence at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, where she lives, and is working on two photographic projects that build on scientific research as a means to speak about the fragility of the ocean ecosystem and forest ecology in the face of global warming.
Steve Goldband & Ellen Konar – Cut Short
Ellen and Steve are life partners and collaborators in fine art photography. Their co-productions are often strong geometries in muted tones, evidencing Steve’s eye for geometry and light, elevated by Ellen’s interest in memory, meaning, and color. The translucency and mystery of their images are heightened by their embrace of the imperfection-laden beauty of Japanese Kozo papers and the infusion of encaustic wax. The resultant images quietly draw the viewer into the complex and tension-filled interactions between humans and the natural world.
Their images have appeared at galleries and museums such as the Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston, Soho Photo Gallery, NYC, Corden|Potts Gallery, SF, Berkeley Art Center, Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, Awagami Museum, Tokyo, Lenswork Magazine, and The Forward.
Awards include selection as a Critical Mass Finalist in 2020 and semi-finalist in the Awagami International Mini Print Exhibition. Steve and Ellen received PhD’s in Psychology and were contributors to the emergence of the digital age during their work at tech giants including Apple, IBM, Intel, and Google.
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At the market, I pick each one up, pulled in by the shapes as they sit together, waiting. I feel its heft in my hand, enjoy the textures of the skin or peel, and begin to look closer and closer. The patterns on each individual surface marks them as distinct. I push further still, discovering territory unseen by the casual observer, a new land. I am like a satellite orbiting a distant planet, taking the first-ever images of this newly envisioned place.
This project started as an homage to Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30 (I am, ironically, allergic to peppers). As I looked for my subject matter at the market, I found that I wasn’t drawn to just one single fruit or vegetable. There were so many choices, appealing to both hand and eye. I decided to print in black and white to help make the images visually more about the shapes, and not about guessing which fruit is smoothest, which vegetable is greenest.
Artistic Purpose/Intent
Artistic Purpose/Intent
Tricia Gahagan
Photography has been paramount in my personal path of healing from disease and
connecting with consciousness. The intention of my work is to overcome the limits of the
mind and engage the spirit. Like a Zen koan, my images are paradoxes hidden in plain
sight. They are intended to be sat with meditatively, eventually revealing greater truths
about the world and about one’s self.
John Chervinsky’s photography is a testament to pensive work without simple answers;
it connects by encouraging discovery and altering perspectives. I see this scholarship
as a potential to continue his legacy and evolve the boundaries of how photography can
explore the human condition.
Growing my artistic skill and voice as an emerging photographer is critical, I see this as
a rare opportunity to strengthen my foundation and transition towards an established
and influential future. I am thirsty to engage viewers and provide a transformative
experience through my work. I have been honing my current project and building a plan
for its complete execution. The incredible Griffin community of mentors and the
generous funds would be instrumental for its development. I deeply recognize the
hallmark moment this could be for the introduction of the work. Thank you for providing
this incredible opportunity for budding visions and artists that know they have something