On Seeing | Amber Crabbe, Melinda Hurst Frye, Sarah Grew & Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

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.