Griffin Atelier Gallery

July 9, 2012 (Winchester, MA)_ Alysia Macaulay says her project The Quiet “was created as a visual response to chaos, both past and present, in my life.”

The Quiet is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum July 19 through September 2. An opening reception with the artist is July 19, 7 p.m.

“Centered within the intimate confines of my family and home, this series takes the viewer from the first break of dawn into the hollow hours that pass through the night,” Macaulay says. “Each image illustrates quiet, a necessary documentation, as chaos overpowers and often erases any memory of existence.

She continues, “Through this project I explore the beauty, poignancy and loneliness of quiet. While it is something we often crave and strive for, it is easily bypassed or abandoned altogether.”

Macaulay says that living in a digital age, people are compelled to stay connected even when alone.

“How then does one process and reflect before moving forward?” she asks. “Quiet gives us that opportunity, however, it has to be recognized and ultimately balanced. Too much quiet is often equated with loneliness and the lack of it leaves one overwhelmed. Due to its very nature, quiet is easily overlooked. This series is meant to bring the viewer into a place of quiet.”

Macaulay, a native of Boston who now lives in New York, graduated from William Smith College with a degree in art history and studied at the International Center of Photography in New York.  Her work has been widely exhibited.

St. George is a fishing town of 2,800 people and not a single traffic light. It is situated on the Bay of Fundy in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The magnificent bay is known for the highest tides on earth, frigid waters, and dramatic skies. The short maritime summers with long evenings are cherished as a time for gathering around bonfires as they have been for generations.

St. George’s economy is based on its thriving farm raised salmon industry. To give you a sense of the scale, Cooke Aquaculture annually sells more than 160 million pounds of Atlantic Salmon. Because the traditional catch of herring or cod have diminished, independent fishermen now meet the demands of expanding global markets by scuba diving for sea urchins, harvesting periwinkles and seaweed, and hauling in lobsters.

Being a photographer and new to the Bay of Fundy, I documented our family adventures in this landscape. As friends and neighbors shared antidotes about their home, I recognized it was in flux, and decided to create a more enduring document to speak to the collective memory of the people of St. George and New Brunswick.

This body of work consists of two distinct series, “Shades and Shadows” and “Skylight Views”.

These images were taken in my home, an intimate and familiar place to me. They take on temporal qualities of a slow, quiet nature as I observe their constantly shifting features. Shown in sequences or assemblages, they reflect on the act of deliberately looking; creating a visual language of fragmented moments, layering the complexities of the human capacity to comprehend

In Shades and Shadows I have recorded the light and shadows cast on a window shade. Ever changing in their appearance, yet remaining constant in their physicality; light, and time transforming the viewer’s experience. Each photograph is a suspended moment, continuous and fleeting.

Skylight Views are observances seen through a skylight. They are, at first, spatially ambiguous until one grasps their unique perspective, evoking a somewhat uncomfortable or disorienting sensation. The viewer is invited to look at and through the glass surface, observing the presence of time through the changing seasons and light.

Viewing each work becomes an experience relating to the viewers understanding of his own surroundings. These ephemeral images evoke the passage of time, seasons and weather. They heighten our sense of impermanence. The subject matter becomes the experience of seeing; common encounters in intimate and familiar places explore moments where content and meaning become inseparabl

June 20, 2011 (Winchester, MA)__Sarah Malakoff creates large scale color photographs that are examinations of the home and its psychologically charged, uncanny spaces and objects.

A series of her photographs, Living Arrangements, is featured in the Atelier Gallery of the Griffin Museum June 29 through August 29. An opening reception is June 29, 7-8:30 p.m.

“My photographs are examinations of the home as both a refuge from and at times a recreation of nature,’’ Malakoff says. “In my images, architecture and furnishings appear as uncanny symbols of culture, family, and relationships to the outside world.’’

Intentionally excluding human occupants from her photographs, Malakoff says her subjects “spark curious speculation of their own. The private and personal are expressed in part by objects and signifiers which are displayed versus those which are hidden; what is allowed inside and what is kept out.’’ For example, she says, “doors and windows both frame exterior views and keep the elements at bay. Land, weather, and wildlife are ever present on the other side of the wall, even as they are brought safely inside in the form of pattern, simulation, and domesticated animals.’’ Malakoff says her photographs “speak to notions of comfort, class, and style, as well as universal attempts to control and transcend our environment.’’  There are tensions, and humor, between absence and presence, old and new, real and surreal, permanent and transient, genuine and artificial.

“The desire to resolve these tensions drives viewers to create their own narratives and imagine possible inhabitants,’’ Malakoff says.

A native of Andover, MA, Malakoff received a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1994 and a master’s in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1997.

She has had many solo exhibitions and her work is included in the collections of The deCordova Museum, Simmons College, Smith College Museum of Art, and Fidelity Investments. She lives in Boston and teaches at UMASS Dartmouth. She just received a Mass Cultural Council’s photography fellowship in May 2011.

The opening reception is June 29, 7-8:30 p.m. The public is welcome. Prior to the reception, at 6:15 p.m., Malakoff presents a talk for Griffin Museum members on her exhibit, Living Arrangements.

The impetus for this work stretches back to my childhood when my father made chicken soup every other Monday. I loved the soup and never tired of it but I remember at a certain point he began putting several pairs of bright yellow chicken feet into the pot along with the chicken. The sight of multiple pairs of feet was jarring and it left a lasting impression. Soup from that point on was no longer the simple comfort food it had been.

This Christmas while I was washing a turkey to cook for dinner, I noticed that the bird had bruises on both of its elbows. It is difficult to see food as both fellow animal and meal and this view does carry into my work.

Like many others today, I see food as a complicated comfort. This aspect of being attracted and repelled carries through in much of my work. I think it is part of looking at things as they are. Often my photographs delve into abstraction but the real, sometimes unsightly, aspects of life are still present; there is the bit of animal tissue floating in the soup or, as in another project, the dirt spots on the window.

As a younger person, I read Tolstoy and loved the multidimensional nature of his characters. The people in Tolstoy’s novels have the possibility for both good and evil and this makes one believe in the truthfulness of the writing, to believe that something real from life has been crafted in to the novel. I hope that the same is true in my photographs, that I have allowed the subject to bring with it those aspects from life that might not seem to fit with the estheticized object, so that through discord an authentic view of life is captured. The meat pictures are meant to say, it is a chicken or a pig or the fat rendered from the pig’s body and it is delicious and beautiful and horrible.

I came of age as an artist making sculpture and looking at the work of Joseph Beuys and others. I saw food as a legitimate material for art making and I made my first sculptures and photographs from fruit in the mid 1990’s. That work was made as sculpture and the photograph was a means to document the work. The food pictures from the 2010’s are an outgrowth of this earlier work but are in the tradition of two-dimensional art, and draw from both photography and painting.

All the food pictures came about either before or after I cooked something and when I saw the possibility for a photograph.

January 11, 2010 (Winchester, MA) As a child growing up near the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona, Laszlo Layton spent summers there studying animals and natural history.  He later worked in the motion picture industry for more than 20 years and spent his evenings and weekends painting.

 

When he read about contemporary photographers reviving 19^th-century photo printing processes, he became fascinated by the oldest formulas for handmade photographic prints. He restored an old Deardorff studio view camera and was inspired to rediscover his youthful interest in zoology.

 

Cabinet of Curiosities and Pictorial Zoology, two series of his photographs, are featured in The Atelier Gallery of the Griffin Museum January 21 through March 28. The exhibit is courtesy of the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. An opening reception is January 21, 7-9 PM.

 

Cabinet of Curiosities is inspired by illuminated books on nature from the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, illustrated with engravings and lithographs of drawings based on mounted specimens or written accounts by naturalists, rather than direct nature observation.

“What these illustrations may have lacked in scientific accuracy, they more than made up for in artistic expression,’’ says Layton. “With this series, I have attempted to recapture and distill the essence of those old natural history illustrations, but through the photographic medium.’’

And, he says, “I plan to pursue this series for a number of years so that I can include a great many animal species that are extinct, rare, forgotten, or mostly unfamiliar, in addition to the better known wildlife. Many of the species I have chosen to photograph are, for personal reasons, somehow related to my own life experience, giving the series an autobiographical aspect, as well.’’

Pictorial Zoology is a group of 36 photographs that picks up where Cabinet of Curiosities left off.  While Cabinet of Curiosities is dominated by bird and mollusk imagery, Pictorial Zoology focuses on mammals.

“I decided to loosen up my self-imposed rules and criteria for the images and introduce a more creative, and more photographic approach to my subject matter,’’ says Layton. “Greater emphasis has now been placed on capturing the mood or attitude of the individual creatures, rather than how to best represent them in their entirety. The result of my interpretation of nature may be less scientific this time, but hopefully more artistic as the series continues to grow and evolve.’’

“Laszlo Layton’s photographs are reminiscent of the scientific expedition specimen illustrations of wildlife artists such as Jacques Burkhardt or Louis Agassiz Fuertes,” says Paula Tognarelli executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Through his Cyanotypes, Layton brings us a modern day explanation of animals using antiquarian methods of inquiry.”

Layton, who lives in Arizona, is self-taught. His work is exhibited widely.

Courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery Santa Monica CA.

June 11, 2009 (Winchester, MA)__ Justin James King photographs an anonymous public standing in front of the landscape, which he calls “a manifestation of culture.” He says that what viewers see in the landscape “are preconceived notions and pre-experienced views.”  Catherine Edelman, juror for the Griffin’s 15^th Juried Exhibition, awarded King this year’s Arthur Griffin Legacy Award. King’s winning images join 50 others as part of the juried exhibition on display in the Griffin’s Main Gallery July 8 through August 30. Approximately 400 photographers from around the world submitted more than 2000 images to Edelman, owner of the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. King, of Brooklyn, New York, received the $1,000 Arthur Griffin Legacy Award for three pieces from his And Still We Gather with Infinite Momentum series. The prints are part of a conceptual project on landscape and culture.

“The void in each of King’s landscapes could be the dark abyss of the future,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography.” Each viewer’s interpretation of the scene before them is personal and contextual.”

Lauren Semivan of Royal Oak, Michigan, received the $500 Griffin Award for her photographs Black and White Rabbits and The Swan, which are part of a series called Weights and Measures.

Ryan Zoghlin of Chicago, Illinois, was awarded an exhibition on the web for the Griffin Museum’s Virtual Gallery. Greg Sand of Clarksville, Tennessee, was awarded an exhibition on the Critic’s Pick section of the Griffin Museum website.

In addition to the awards, two artists were selected to present a joint show in the museum’s Atelier Gallery. Dana Fritz of Lincoln, Nebraska, was chosen to exhibit her Terraria Gigantica: the World Under Glass. Fritz’s images examine the world’s largest landscape complexes; the Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, Biosphere 2 near Tucson, Arizona, and The Eden Project near St. Austell, Cornwall, UK. Christopher Sims of Efland, North Carolina, was selected for his Home Fronts: The Pretend Villages of Taletha and Braggistan, a series of photographs portraying simulated Iraqi and Afghan villages on U.S. Army training bases in North Carolina and Louisiana.

 “This year for our 15^th Juried Exhibition, Catherine Edelman has assembled a superb photographic display,’’ says Tognarelli. “The exhibition has a very compelling rhythm that demonstrates Edelman’s personal and unique vision.”

  Featured in the Griffin Gallery is the Joan Johnson Exhibition, showcasing the work of local high school seniors.  The winner of this year’s $1,000 Joan Johnson Scholarship was Lily Kupets, a recent senior at Winchester High School. Jurors were photographer Andrea Rosenthal of Boston and Rory Schuler, editor of the Winchester Star newspaper.

August 30, 2009  (Winchester, MA) With paper a rare and expensive commodity in the 19^th century, books’ endpapers were often used as note pads to practice spelling, jot down lists, and record purchases.

As a girl, Zeva Oelbaum was fascinated with the Hebrew books in her family’s basement and the scribbles and markings she found in the endpapers.

Years later, as a photographer interested in found objects, she revisited her childhood preoccupation. Manipulating imagery from her family’s books and others from the Jewish community, she created a body of work that transforms markings in several languages – Latin, Russian, German, Polish, Aramaic, and Yiddish — into a coherent visual story.

Her series of photographs, Hand to Hand, is featured in the Atelier Gallery of the Griffin Museum September 10 through November 1. An opening reception is September 16. The exhibit is courtesy of the Hirschl + Adler Modern, NY.

“These orphaned tomes connected me to a time and place far beyond my Missouri upbringing,’’ Oelbaum says of her family’s books. “I imagined how they had traveled from hand to hand for centuries, like portable identities.’’

The photographs, which are toned gelatin silver prints, are intended to give the viewer a sense of scanning over a page; some are presented as diptychs and some as triptychs.

Oelbaum’s aim is to immortalize the inherent lyricism in a word, a scribble, and an inkblot. Composed of positive and negative images, the photographs can also be viewed as metaphors for life and death.

A New York-based photographer, Oelbaum has work included in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage, National Museum of the American Indian, and the Polaroid Collection, as well as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

She graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, in 1977 with a degree in anthropology.  She teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York and is the author of two books on photography.

Courtesy of Hirschl + Adler Modern NY