Home Views | Online Artist Conversations – Joy Bush, Jane Szabo, Kathleen Tunnell Handel and Ira Wagner

We are pleased to bring four visual voices from our exhibition Home Views together in conversation about their vision of home.

Join us on online in the Griffin Zoom Room November 10th at 7pm with Joy Bush, Jane Szabo, Ira Wagner and Kathleen Tunnell Handel.

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 on our Griffin Members Community.

For more about the artists –

Joy Bush –

© Joy Bush

Joy Bush is a fine art photographer based in Hamden, CT. She grew up near New York City and as a child, loved family excursions to NYC museums, theater productions, dance performances, and music concerts. The trips always ended with a delightful ice cream cone (or a delicious meal at the Stage Delicatessen). Joy discovered photography as an art form soon after graduating from college and eventually she landed a job as the university photographer for Southern Connecticut State University. Now retired from photographing for the university, she finds that she is drawn to photographing the echoes of the presence of people rather than people themselves.

Jane Szabo –

© Jane Szabo

Jane Szabo is a Los Angeles based fine art photographer with an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her work investigates issues of self and identity. Using self-portraiture and still life as a vehicle to share stories from her life, her work merges her love for fabrication and materials, with conceptual photography. Szabo brings many facets of visual art into her photographic projects, incorporating sculptural, performance and installation elements into her work. Her imagery is often infused with humor and wonder, ingredients that draw the viewer in, inviting them to linger and to have a dialogue with the work, and themselves. Her background in the film industry, creating prop and miniatures for theme parks,  and overseeing set construction for film and television, undoubtedly informs her creative  process.

Szabo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) and her photography has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster, CA, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Yuma Fine Art Center in Arizona, and Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Oceanside Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, The Colorado Center for Photographic Arts, San Diego Art Institute, Los Angeles Center for Photography, Tilt Gallery in Arizona, Houston Center for Photography in Texas, Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, the Kaohsiung International Photographer Exhibition in Taiwan and fotofever in Paris, France.

Her photographs have been featured in many publications and blogs including: The Huffington Post, Lenscratch, Silvershotz, Bokeh Bokeh, L’Oeil de la Photographie, F-Stop Magazine, Foto Relevance, Fraction, Your Daily Photo, A Photo Editor, Don’t Take Pictures, Art & Cake, Diversions LA, ArtsMeme and others.

Kathleen Tunnell Handel –

© Kathleen Tunnell Handel, “Down the Street, California #01, 2018”

Kathleen Tunnell Handel is a photographer engaged in a long–term research based investigation of the affordable housing subgenre of mobile home and manufactured housing communities. Her immersive project “Where the Heart Is: Portraits from Vernacular American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks” includes images from communities, to date, within Maine, California, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Arizona, and Colorado.

Tunnell Handel’s extensive research, conversations with park residents and managers, and collaboration with related professionals, scholars, and housing advocates, all continue to inform her photographic work and her growing advocacy for affordable housing.

Tunnell Handel’s earlier studies in observational and systems–based life sciences at Cornell University, through her exploration of the visual arts and being awarded a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, to ongoing studies of photography, have all contributed to her deep interest in visual culture and themes of memory, life systems, and the human experience.

She lives in NYC and the Berkshires of MA and photographs widely.

Ira Wagner –

© Ira Wagner

Ira Wagner began studying photography in 2008, after working on Wall Street for more than 25 years. With an interest in urban history and design, he has focused on photographing the urban landscape. He received his MFA from the Hartford Art School in 2013 and taught photography at Monmouth University in New Jersey from  2013 to 2021. He is currently the Executive Director of the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ. For his MFA project, Superior Apartments, he spent two years photographing the landscape of the Bronx. In addition to Twinhouses of the Great Northeast, since graduating he has completed his project titled Houseraising, photographing houses being raised on the Jersey Shore following Hurricane Sandy.

This project was featured in The New Republic, The National Geographic, and was released in a photobook by Daylight Books in 2018. Based on images from Twinhouses, he was selected a Critical Mass Top 50 photographer by Photolucida and participated in Review Santa Fe. Twinhouses was also highlighted in a number of photography blogs including The Washington Post and Lenscratch. He is currently
working on photographing the landscape along the Northeast Corridor train route between New York and Washington.