Satellite

We are pleased to welcome the MFA students at Boston University’s department of Print Media & Photography to the Griffin’s satellite gallery at Lafayette City Center Passageway.

Dialogue presents work by Boston University’s Print Media and Photography MFA class of 2025. In this exhibition, each artist expresses their own artistic voice through an interdisciplinary approach that illuminates the nature of this unique MFA program.

Working in darkrooms, printmaking studios and beyond, the artists employ traditional and experimental techniques that oscillate between a variety of mediums to create a range of thematic dialogues.

Collectively, they explore issues of chance, feminism, identity, society, and politics. As you navigate the exhibition, we invite you to engage in these thematic dialogues, questioning and responding to the narratives contained within this body of work.

About the Artists

Shannon Johnson

I see connections everywhere and identify as a radical feminist in that I am constantly examining life through an understanding of structural patriarchy. It is through this radical feminist lens that I explore issues of feminism, bodily autonomy, social justice, intimacy, trauma, mental illness, and especially sexual violence. Using photography, printmaking, bookmaking, installation, and painting, I seek to explore and understand the relationships between the images, objects, and interpretations of the roles and values of women and our bodies. I collect a variety of materials including books, clothing, linens, and household objects as the foundation for many of these works: turning utilitarian, functional objects into works of art, now made neither functional nor utilitarian.

Text, images, and meanings are revealed and obscured through layers of ink, pastel, and paper, coalescing color, shapes, bodies, and subject matter, holes carefully cut through pages to piece together this web of patriarchy. By creating large impressions, I aim to place the viewer in an intimate space, removing the mask and closing the gap between the private and the public. I use self-portraiture and found images including didactic photography to reveal contradictions and, often unrealistic, expectations of the boxes we have been forced into. Through these different modalities, I aim to create an understanding and urgency regarding the intimate, emotional issue of women’s autonomy and freedom. The driving core of my work is the rallying cry of early feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, “the personal is political.” I aim for my work to be confrontational, to incite urgency in the viewer. The goal of my work isn’t to soothe or please the viewer, but to create an intense reaction. My work is explicit, and its rawness and obscenity are essential to convey the urgency of my rage and my abiding need for freedom.

Jason Parent

Born in New Jersey, raised in Upstate New York, and now based in Boston, Massachusetts, Jason Parent is a visual artist and MFA Print Media & Photography candidate at Boston University. With an interdisciplinary skill set, Jason explores the concept of identity.

The hidden and forgotten,
swept under the rug,
buried six feet deep —

A devotion to the exposure of life’s cover-ups inspires my work. Through my interdisciplinary practice, I explore themes of identity, memory, and emotion. Grounded in the excavation of my own existence, my interests expand to issues of gender, sexuality, and the human condition.

Jerry Rodríguez Sosa

Jerry Rodríguez Sosa is an interdisciplinary artist from Brownsville, Texas and Monterrey, México. After earning a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, he worked in data analytics for multiple languages at Apple, followed by an internship in letterpress printmaking at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, Tennessee. Subsequently, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue his MFA in Print Media and Photography at Boston University.

My art is influenced by my heritage and identity. I primarily work with printmaking, photography, and drawing to explore how these intersections can help me craft personal and cultural narratives. My visual language incorporates bodies, symbolisms, text, photo archives, and geographical landscapes to examine and heal the internalities of my Mexican American, queer experience. 

Susan Swirsley

Susan is a visual artist who has traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her diverse travel experiences and background in business and the social sciences offer a rich foundation for her work. The amalgamation of photography with other artistic disciplines, cultures and places opens up fascinating possibilities in her practice.

Currently based in Boston, she is a 2025 MFA candidate in the Print Media and Photography program at Boston University.

I am a photo-based artist who uses historical and contemporary processes to translate digital, film, and camera-less images onto paper, fabric, acrylic, and other surfaces. Resourcefulness, experimentation, and the use of “abandoned” materials such as expired paper and botanical remnants are integral to my practice. I create physical objects, large and small, including handmade books. 
 
My work is focused on the unpredictable intersection of abstract and representational images, weaving them together to create a new reality. I examine and question how photographic images function, what they represent and what we expect of them. Process, materiality, illusion, and the juncture of chance an preservation in photographic images play an important role in my artistic practice. I embrace the principle of chance by using materials (photographic paper and chemicals) in different ways than they are normally intended. This experimentation and element of surprise drives my work and extends to combining photographs with printmaking and painting processes and materials.

Tung Lin Tsai

Tung is a practitioner of everyday life who focuses on the relationship between mundanity and photography. As a photographer, he often incorporates everyday objects into his work. Items such as paper airplanes, plastic bags, office paper, and daily calendars are metaphorically placed in his pieces as political symbols. For Tung, these objects represent not only political language but also the reality of everyday life as a Taiwanese citizen — a citizen of a non-sovereign state. Tung is currently an MFA Photography and Print Media candidate at Boston University, navigating this complex world.

From analog to digital processes, from staged to candid images, I capture the mundane — like flying paper and plastic bags. When my strobes fire, they freeze a split second of reality. A strobe flashes for 1/500 to 1/25,000 of a second, capturing what human eyes can’t perceive. Yet, no matter how fast my strobes are, I can’t freeze this moment of peace. The lightness of everyday life is the true weight of Sisyphus’s rock, eternally rolled uphill. My work, therefore, carries the unbearable lightness of a piece of paper.

In the last days of August, we long for that last bit of summer warmth, to connection with family and hold close that moment of peace and quiet before we all head back into the fall with darker days, colder weather and dispersed family. Time vanishes here, days don’t matter, with days filled with kids splashing in the pool and the nights filled with BBQ, s’mores and ghost stories. Backyards are the American dream, a patch of land we can call our own. Backyards become the gathering space, the place we live outside and filled with individuality.

This Griffin @ Lafayette City Center exhibition in the last days of summer features two artists whose work revolves around the gathering place we call home and the intersection of natural and familial landscapes, urban and suburban living. David Oxton and Gary Beeber create an oasis of color, life and connection to nature in a confined space, suburban backyards. These two artists have given unique vision to how we inhabit the patch of land, urban or suburban.

About Gary Beeber –

Gary Beeber is an award-winning American photographer and filmmaker who has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world.  He has had numerous solo photography exhibitions and his documentary films have been screened at over 150 film festivals.  Pfizer Pharmaceutical, Goldman Sachs and Chase Bank are Fortune 500 companies who collect his work.

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About David Oxton –

David Oxton is Massachusetts north shore photographer who creates photographs that blend candid moments with constructed tableaus. Oxton is both a photographer and educator. Images from his Trackside project have been exhibited at Photographic Resource Center, Montserrat College of Art, and Lesley University; and published in Shots Magazine and Cape Ann Magazine.

David was a commercial and editorial photographer for 10 years before concentrating on fine art photo projects. David lives in Beverly and taught photography at The Governor’s Academy in Byfield for 32 years.

The Griffin @ Lafayette City Center Passageway is located at 2 Ave de Lafayette in Downtown Crossing, Boston. The passageway connects Macy’s, the Lafayette Tower offices and the Hyatt Regency, Boston.

Planting Roots, Growing Community is a visual portrait of the powerful connection between the land and our local neighborhoods. In a world that often feels fast-paced and disconnected, community gardens and family farms offer us a sense of belonging, of being grounded in the soil and history of the places we call home. These green spaces represent not only the growth of flowers, crops and shared harvests, but also the growth of our relationship with the land and with each other. These four photographers, Greg Heins, Ellen Harasimowicz, John Rich and Leann Shamash, through their lenses, share the quiet moments, the landscape and beautiful detail of our shared landscape, discover the roots of our local farms, and to celebrate the growth of the communities that tend them.

Greg Heins – Fall in the Garden

“The photographs respond to the sucesses or failures of the ones that came before. The process is visual. The artistic impulse may be driven by age and loss, anger and regret, by a need for play and freedom but the statement is the photographs. 

We do well to remember that there is no part of our equipment and materials – cameras, printers, ink and paper – that is untouched by the exploitation of others. And that our opportunities were not always granted to others of equal or greater abilities. So it behooves us to create work that is as true and honest and faithful to ourselves as it can be. And to remember that the freedom to do this must be seized again and again.

Greed, hatred indifference and love – in wildly unequal proportions – have given us the world in which we live. Soon enough we will be gone from it, individually and collectively. And yet: can it be that something, like an echo, will remain of our attempts to give sense to it all? We must believe it true.” – Greg Heins

Ellen Harasimowicz – Living Like Grass

“We all live in nature, but some live in it more intimately. Small-family farmers make their mark on the land, and the land provides nourishment and income for their families. They are the backbone of American agriculture, but earning a living wage is difficult, and finding hired help is nearly impossible. Operating expenses are rising, weather extremes are causing erratic crop yields, and farmers are aging out. For many, this way of life is vanishing.

I’ve been coming to Willard Farm in Still River, Massachusetts for almost three decades to buy sunflowers, corn, tomatoes, and pumpkins. For nearly 350 years, nine generations of Willards have lived and farmed here, rooted in the same soil as their ancestors going back to the Nashaway people. But three years ago, I noticed fewer offerings at the farm stand. Today, the primary farmer, Paul Willard, is 80 and moves slower. He shares the family farmhouse with his brother Wendell, a cabinetmaker, and Wendell’s wife, Elizabeth, a poet. The title of this project is from one of her poems.

For the last 20 years, I’ve photographed the farm, interested not only in the legacy of this land but also in the details of farm life. During the pandemic, when just about everything shut down, farmers still planted crops, and farm stands remained open. Willard Farm became my refuge and my muse. When I asked Paul what his plans were for the future, he said, “I don’t have any real plans. I think I’m just going to wind down. Keep doing what I’m doing, but less of it, and slower. And someday, slow will be indeterminable from still. And then we’ll be done.” That was three years ago. This spring, Paul sold vegetable plants that he grew in the greenhouses. Then he received some discouraging news from his doctor. Today, the fields are fallow except for a small kitchen garden. Their farm stand has closed. A few months ago, no one, not even Paul Willard, imagined the end was so close.” – Ellen Harasimowicz

John Rich – A Year Above the Gardens

“What I did during the pandemic (from mid-first wave through the Delta variant), was photograph the community gardens near my home in Brookline, from above, every two weeks for one year.

With their promise of growth and renewal, the gardens were truly an oasis for me during the isolation of lockdown. I piloted a camera/drone to shoot the terrain from the identical vantage point each time, showing the gardens in moments of bloom, decay, and rest.

By focusing on a landscape transformed through seasonal change and human intervention, these images allow us to connect to the earth and perceive the affirmative power of change.” – John Rich

Leann Shamash – Community Gardens

“A piece of land, 12x by 12x, in the midst of other similarly parceled spots.

What to do in this puzzle of growing spaces? Community gardens are for growing things. Some use the space for bushes and small trees, some for fragrant herbs and many for vegetables.  Some grow a few flowers and add a chair to create a living space in the midst of the field. 

Community gardens are for gardeners, a special breed of people, who each year attempt to defy the odds and grow vegetables, despite attacks of unpredictable weather, insects, disease, and animals that tunnel and jump over fences.  Gardeners are eternal optimists, who love to share their challenges and successes with one another.

I love to garden and to see how things grow, knowing that I fail more than I succeed at growing things. I love to observe what gardeners bring from the world outside of the garden into their spaces to uniquely individualize their space, for isn’t that something we all do in our lives?

Last, gardens, both community and private are nothing more than canvases which we can design and paint how we wish.  These canvases offer us quiet and an escape from the world outside the garden, truly a place to meditate and a place to grow.” – Leann Shamash

We are pleased to welcome the MFA students at Boston University’s department of Print Media & Photography to the Griffin’s satellite gallery at Lafayette City Center Passageway. These five students are the first cohort of the program, and we are thrilled to see their culminating work in this exhibition. On view from October 2, 2023 through January 7, 2024, “Rendering Experiences” combines five artists’ perspectives on how stories of the self are formed, shaped, interpreted, and valued in our world.

About the Artists