Griffin Atelier Gallery

Meditations in an Emergency

Influenced by my own queer experience and ideals of mid-century American culture, my work investigates a familiar environment that alludes to something more enigmatic. Creating vignettes of this space and time allows for the images to exist in reality or remain fictitious. 

Initially making work about control of the environment, I am able to create a safe space for the narrative to unfold; purposely diverting from what we may consider conventional. The characters become distant protagonists as the work allows the viewer to respond as a voyeur.

“Meditations in an Emergency” explores quiet amongst chaos. By focusing on themes of disaster and tragedy I am able to address the human condition; attempting to thrive in times of turmoil.

About Kevin Bennett Moore

Kevin Bennett Moore (b. 1996) is an artist living and working in Boston. His self-portrait based projects largely discuss queerness by utilizing the past to talk about current politics. Moore is influenced greatly by films of the 1950s & 60s, gender performativity, and ideals of mid-century American culture. He graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a degree in photography (BFA ’20)

Homeshadows is a study of solitude.  Over the course of a year and at the height of the pandemic in 2020, I found myself in a new home and very much alone on a day-to-day basis.   As an introvert and sometimes anxious person, it was a bit of a dream come true.  But while I wasn’t exactly lonely, I was yearning to use my time creatively and feel connected to something while the world outside raged.    I began to document the light and shadows that streamed through the windows of my house.  Everything in my home was new to me, and I had the pleasure of watching the seasons unfold from the inside.  I sometimes put myself in the images to round out the developing narrative.  I worked to capture light and manage composition with great attention to mood and detail in order to convey the sense of solitude, beauty, and mystery that I was experiencing during this period of time.  Although I had been taking photographs for many years, this was my first intentional series and attempt at cohesive storytelling through images.

I am eager to continue the path of storytelling through photography.   The grant money would be used towards printing and framing expenses for my series Homeshadows, as well as for a new project which explores the following theme:  things women hide from themselves and others.  

My love of photography began as a young girl leafing through my mother’s Vogue magazines and feeling enthralled by the lush images within. As a pre-teen I made images of my family with a Kodak Instamatic 100, and documented the mundane details of my day-to-day life. It seemed that everything looked more glamorous printed on 4×4 squares, accompanied by strips of eerie negatives. I was hooked. As an adult photographing a world which is increasingly complex, my lens seeks out simple, quiet subjects that are familiar yet presented in a distinctive way. Influenced by the work of Vivian Maier, Gordon Parks, and Sally Mann, I’m drawn to photographing people in the world around me. Whether that world is within my own four walls or a country I’ve never stepped foot in, my desire to observe others is the foundation for a great deal of my work. By sharing my images, I hope to spark human connections and emphasize our commonality through a moment captured in time.

About Bridget Jourgensen

I grew up in the era of Kodak film and heavy 35mm cameras with popping flashbulbs that were too hot to touch after being used. I still remember how my mother would eject them into the nearest ashtray where they would smolder and sizzle for a bit.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100. I made images of my room, my family, myself, my pets – the usual things. My ordinary life somehow seemed glamorous when printed on 4×4 squares, accompanied by strips of eerie negatives. I was hooked.

Thousands of photographs later, the joy of shooting and editing endures, particularly as I uncover themes in my work that have emerged over the years.

The Griffin Museum of Photography is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2024 John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship, Bridget Jourgensen. Her series Homeshadows captivated this year’s jury to earn her a monetary award, an upcoming exhibition and artist talk at the Griffin Museum as well as a volume from the collection of photographer John Chervinsky.

Over 281 photographers submitted applications to be considered for the scholarship this year. The jurors, Arlette and Gus Kayafas, Frazier King and Bruce Myren have selected Bridget Jourgensen as the 2024 recipient of the John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship.

In the 21st century, with the ubiquity of digital imaging, the omnipresence of the internet as a means of exchange, and the rise of artificial intelligence, we face a new era where the camera is now an active participant in the role of seeing. Imagery and photography are being significantly used to control our lives. Yet, this massive ideological paradigm shift in image-making and interpretation remains invisible to most.
My work investigates the various ways in which visual technology transforms, commodifies, and regulates our lives – with specific attention devoted to the notion of privacy. The average person is largely unaware of the ways in which image-based technology is invading their private sphere; actively dismantling any reasonable expectation of privacy. If these systems remain unseen than how will this average citizen begin to understand how they are affected?
These invisible technological systems are turned visible through my work for the viewer so they can understand the constraints placed on their lives. My work uses image- making in a performative way to interact with these technological tools of control to make the viewer aware of the convoluted architecture and infrastructure of machine vision and the authority embedded within. I intentionally misuse, re-imagine, and repurpose a variety of surveillance technology to create my photographic work. I actively subvert the original intention of this technology through my art as an act of protest.
Algorithms, neural networks, and the language of the computer are transformed into artwork that relies on pictorial traditions for the viewer to more easily grasp the information they are receiving. My work turns the abstract and intangible into something material for the viewer to recognize and interpret. This process of transformation is central for the viewer to understand the politics entrenched in this technological battleground.
Ultimately, at the core of my work is an interrogation of the reliance on this visual technology as a mechanism of power and what this means for our future as we rely on automated computer programming. There are irreparable consequences surveillance technology has on us as a global society and the 21st century requires a new form of visual literacy to understand what is at stake.

About Marcus DeSieno —

Marcus DeSieno is a visual artist interrogating institutions of power through the language of photography. DeSieno is particularly interested in documenting the continued legacies of American Empire and how visual technology is used as a tool of oppression by the State. DeSieno often uses specific historic and experimental analog photographic processes to create conversations between power and history. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and is currently Associate Professor of Photography at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.

DeSieno’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Paris Photo, The Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland, Photo Access in Canberra, Australia, Center for Fine Art Photography, Candela Gallery, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and various other galleries and museums. His work has also been featured in a variety of publications including The British Journal of Photography, The Boston Globe, FeatureShoot, GUP Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, National Geographic, PDN, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, and Wired. DeSieno was named a selection for Photolucida’s Critical Mass 50 and an Emerging Talent by Lensculture. His first monograph, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State, was published by Daylight Books.

2023 Members Juried Exhibition Director’s Prize Winner Suzanne Theodora White’s series Dry Stone No Sound of Water is a deeply layered, textured look at how we see the landscape. Her constructions beg us to look deeper, to explore the frame, finding something familiar, yet seeing the world differently. Her still life images combine pieces of nature and photography to create new landscapes for us to transit.

I have a profound connection to the natural world and the human impact on our environment has been an overriding theme in my work throughout my years as an artist. The farm that I live on and have worked for decades, is my muse, where I record changes linked to climate disruption, time, and memory. Through an inter-disciplinary practice including photography, video, and site-specific installations, I explore issues of life, death, grief, and our cultural disconnect from nature. With my work I am asking, can art carry the burden of remembering the past, while confronting what the future may hold? From a fixed point on the map, I am a traveler through the Anthropocene.

About Suzanne Theodora White

Trained as a painter, Suzanne studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, and has an MFA from Maine Media College. She was a two-time winner of fellowships awarded by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After receiving the first of these awards, she spent over a year on the road traveling alone, overland, through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East. In the 1980’s and 90’s she made extended trips to South America to study birds in the Amazon basin and Central America.

Suzanne has had many solo exhibitions and has been included in group shows over her long career including Yale University, New Haven, CT; Cove Street Arts, Portland, ME; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Art Institute of Boston; Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, MA; and Colby College, Waterville, ME.

Suzanne lives in Maine with her two dogs and a large flock of chickens.

Rodrigo Valenzuela works in the fields of photography, video, and installation. His artistic vision is based on the contradictory genres of documentary and fiction. In his new exhibition, New Land, Valenzuela showcases a series of recently commissioned desert images on canvas. These images delve into the intersecting themes of home, man-made borders, and dystopia. 

About Rodrigo Valenzuela –

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.Santiago, Chile 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is the Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela has been awarded the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; Joan Mitchell award for painters and sculptors; Art Matters Foundation grant; and Artist trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include: New Museum, NY; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, AU; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene; Orange County Museum; Portland Art Museum; Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Recent residencies include: Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; MacDowell Colony; Bemis Center for contemporary arts; Lightwork; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock.

The Griffin Museum is excited to announce Rodrigo Valenzuela as our first Cummings Fellow. We are grateful to the Cummings Foundation for their support of the arts and the Griffin Museum. The Cummings Residency program highlights artists of diverse backgrounds and using their specific skill set, work to create a photographically based exhibition as a result of their connection to the Griffin Museum, Winchester and surrounding areas, while engaging in critical dialogues about art and culture with both the youth and adult community they inhabit. Using photography as a bridge to building relationships, the Cummings Fellow creates a series of images opening up the pathways to multicultural understanding and acceptance. The museum and its partners are creating a literacy program centered around imagery, using photography as the tool, working with professional artists to talk about their communities, cultures and new and shared origin stories.

Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography and video by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews. As we reveal Petal—a persona as whom Philip writes, and whom David photographs—the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances in domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the images and poems reveal surprising relationships between character, observer, and author. The photographs provide one record of Petal and Philip’s personalities, blurring art-historical feminine / masculine postures and gestures. The poems provide another which elaborates upon the lived experience of performing or, sometimes, obscuring or protecting the self from being seen. Thus, a continuous exchange between photographer and two subjects in one body reflects the complications of power and gender expression through the history of photography.

About the Collaborators

David Johnson is an artist, educator, and curator based in Conway, SC. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 and earned his BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography from Texas Christian University. In 2011, David was awarded the Great Rivers Visual Arts Award from the Gateway Foundation. This biennial award culminated with his 2012 exhibition institutional etiquette and strange overtones at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. Wig Heavier Than a Boot, a collaborative project with poet Philip Matthews, was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2019 and was featured at the Fotofest Biennial 2020 in Houston. The University of Texas Press published Johnson’s second book It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival in March of 2021.

Art Museum Saint Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, National Building Museum in Washington D.C. and Rathaus in Stuttgart, Germany. His work can be found in the collection at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Don’t Take Pictures, the Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, Photo-emphasis and Fraction Magazine have featured his work online. David has curated exhibitions for Center of Creative Arts, Paul Artspace and the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St Louis. Currently, Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Coastal Carolina University.

Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual, queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next.

Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action.
In two 6-month phases over the past three years, he returned to North Carolina to de-hoard his grandmother’s home and repair the physical and energetic infrastructures of a shared family place. This collaborative work with his mother has laid ground for new writing to take root.

He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.

The commodification of the commonplace became a running theme of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having made homebodies of us all, COVID-19 created absurd rolling shortages, of flour, hair dye, and of course, toilet paper. This was the genesis of the work by the Rolls & Tubes Collective. In this work, each of the four artists reinterpreted a known photograph in the arc of contemporary, and the history of photography, utilizing toilet paper as an element of the image.

The artists who comprise the collective –

Colleen Mullins is a photographer and book artist. She has garnered numerous grants and fellowships, including two McKnight Fellowships, four Minnesota State Arts Board Grants, and in 2020, she was a nominee for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award for her project “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress”. Additionally, she has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Penland School of Crafts Winter Residency, and In Cahoots Residency. Mullins’ work is in the collections of the US Embassy in Moscow, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Southeast Museum of Photography, among others. Her publications include Photo District News (PDN), The Oxford American Eyes on the South, The New York Times Lens Blog, and numerous textbooks. She has authored articles for Afterimage and PDNedu. Recent exhibitions include Griffin Museum of Photographic Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image with the Rolls & Tubes Collective.

Jenny Sampson was born and raised in San Francisco and currently resides in Berkeley, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychobiology in 1991 at Pitzer College and has since dedicated her time to her photographic endeavors: wet plate collodion, traditional black and white photography and commissioned portraits. Sampson is a member of The Rolls and Tubes Collective. Her first monograph, Skaters, was published in October 2017 by Daylight Books and Jenny’s Skater Girls in September 2020.

Nicole White is a Bay Area artist and curator. White uses historical and contemporary photographic processes to examine the medium’s varied functionality while looking at the American cultural landscape. She holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art (2002), a MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut (2010) and a MFA in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012). She is a Professor of Art (Photography) at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA. In 2021, she published a book, Rolls & Tubes: A History of Photography, in collaboration with Christy McDonald, Colleen Mullins, and Jenny Sampson.

Christy McDonald uses photography as a way of engaging with the world and exploring the varied cultural and social conditions she encounters. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Christy holds a B.A. in Art (photography) from UC Berkeley, is a member of the Rolls and Tubes Photographic Collective, and has ongoing personal projects in parts of the Middle East and the California Central Valley.

About Xuan Hui Ng

My name is Xuan Hui. I am from Singapore and currently live in Tokyo.

I began photographing as a form of self-therapy. I was grieving the loss of my mother to cancer.  She had been both my confidante and my moral compass. Losing her plunged me into a downward spiral until a chance encounter with nature set me on my path to recovery.  Its vastness gave me a sense of perspective while its beauty reignited in me a sense of wonder and adventure.  It reminded me that life is beautiful, that there is so much to live for and to explore.

Initially, the urge to photograph stemmed from an almost desperate desire to prolong the serenity that nature brought.  Over time, I began to enjoy simply being in the embrace of the forests, lakes and meadows.  The Chinese idiom “天时地利人和”  speaks to the importance of fortuitous timing (天时), favorable conditions (地利) and the human resolve (人和) to our endeavors.  I think this is especially true for my photography because my images are a collaborative effort with nature.  I am grateful to be blessed with serendipitous encounters and would like to share these precious tokens of memories with others. 

Nature has been pivotal to my own healing and growth.  I dedicate my images to kindred spirits, the weary, the lost and the lonesome. I hope that they can experience the joy I felt when I laid my eyes on these magical landscapes.