Digits @ Lafayette City Center | Artist Reception

We are thrilled to host eleven creative artists in the Griffin Zoom Room on April 25th at 4pm Eastern celebrating the work of Digits: A Parallel Universe.

This virtual offering will stream live from our Griffin Zoom Room for registrants to enjoy at home. Registrants will receive links to view this program via email within 24 hours of the event start time.

Digits: A Parallel Universe is intended as a conjectured and separate plane of reality, that co-exists with the photographer’s own here and now. Each photographer has invented her or his own fiction. There is digital intervention in every photograph in the exhibition yet the methods vary as to how the altered results are manufactured. The viewer is reminded of what it might feel like to be in a changing state, time or dimension.

There are eleven photographers in Digits: A Parallel Universe. The photographers are: Debe Arlook, Diana Cheren Nygren, Najee Dorsey, Cathy Cone, Miren Etcheverry, Dennis Geller, Bill Gore, Marcy Juran, Deborah Kaplan, Lisa Ryan and Gordon Saperia.

Debe Arlook photographs landscapes of the American West. She hoped that through her images in Forseeable Cache she could communicate the experience of how the resultant energy of meditation feels and looks. She has spent a lifetime pursuing spiritual growth.

Diana Cheren Nygren’s photographs in When the Trees are Gone, come straight from her imagination as a cautionary tale. Each of the six photographs depict city living in crisis. Told through the veil of humor and prophesy, we see high hopes that art can be an impetus for change.

Hand Painted Photographs by Cathy Cone is a blending of two worlds. First, the final imagery is pulled from the past to rise transformed in the present. The tintypes change from standalone antique portraits to objects infused by a modern breath and brush. Rather than relying just on the photographic image or just a painted artifact, Cone’s amalgam of mediums shapes her unique narrative.

Najee Dorsey digitally collages narratives of Black life in history and present day that must be retold and remembered. Two of his artworks in Digits: A Parallel Universe feature prominent African American artists; Kara Walker and Basquiat. Walker is famous for her cut paper silhouetted narratives haunted by the atrocities of slavery. Basquiat’s work has been attributed to elevating graffiti artists to the art scene. In 1982, the sale of Basquiat’s art set a record for the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist’s work.

Miren Etcheverry uses family photographs and digital assemblage to create portrait tributes to the female family members and friends who have influenced her life. She calls these digital creations her “goddesses”. The title of her compilation of all this work is called Oh My Goddess! Most of Etcheverry’s family live across the Atlantic in France but in her studio they all are a “desktop” away.

Dennis Geller’s path began in exploring representational subjects in his photographs.  He honed his perception in the studio and then the forest. Deeper dives into the language of photography brought him to explore the presence of light in the everyday as well as articulating the physicality of emotions in the abstract, the science of vision and the dimensions of time and change.

Bill Gore – The Land bears constant witness and reveals itself as an endless stream of images. But the conscious mind is selective, and memory illusive. ‘My Life Could Be a Dream’ series works in the realm of perception and illusion and explores our mental processes of combining new and remembered visual inputs while we create our own realities…

Marcy Juran blends digital processes and family photographs in Family History | Family Mystery, her altered reality where generations of her family can gather in one place.

Deborah Kaplan creates her own language from photographs she’s made in nature in Syllabary for a Natural World. These natural symbols are true digits. As Kaplan mentions in her statement, she “aims to recreate a language that never was, but which ought to be”.

Lisa Ryan’s family was constantly on the move. As a result she says she was always trying to orient herself in new environments. She uses infrared photography to show her anomalous perspective as a “stranger in a strange land”. *  Infrared light lies beyond the visible light spectrum and can’t be seen by the human eye.

Gordon Saperia looks for the grand landscapes as he travels the world. He is not shy in using digital manipulation to augment the original photograph to represent his emotional response to a scene. Sometimes it is minor color shifts or contrast moves. Other times he combines elements to shape a “brave new world.” **