Griffin Atelier Gallery

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.

My parents, older sister and I immigrated to the US when I was an infant. Growing up far away from extended family, I missed what I imagined to be the grounding force of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents around me.

My parents rarely spoke of their lives in Belgium in the 1940s – 1960s. Eventually I showed my mother a family portrait from her childhood, and asked, “What do you see?” She began to tell me an inter-generational story of feuds over money, alcoholism, infidelity, child abandonment, jealousy, and domestic abuse. This ongoing multimedia series is my interpretation of fragments of family history, primarily as experienced by girls and women.

About Anne Piessens

Anne Piessens is a Boston-based fine art photographer whose work reimagines family history and our relationship with the natural world.

Her current series, Origin Stories, brings elements of magical realism into hand-collaged fragments of family portraits. Past projects include Meliorations, which imagines ways to heal damaged landscapes, and In the Middle of Something, a portrait series about the tween years.

In an 1895 photograph from the University of Michigan Philippine archives, a smiling Filipina faces the camera, posing in front of lush tropical trees with a hand on her hip. The bottom half of her body is wrapped in an intricate tapestry, and the top half of her body is naked, except for beaded necklaces. Written into the photograph is the title “Young Ifugao Belle, 382.” This image is just one of thousands of photographs
taken by American colonizers who were eager to create a narrative of white saviorism and thus shape the way Americans perceived the Philippines throughout the twentieth century.

I am a Filipino-American photographer and artist, and I have been creating mixed-media photocollages based upon archival images from the American colonial period in the Philippines for my project titled Field Notes. By physically cutting, pasting, and rearranging various elements of images upon images, I aim to deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze, while attempting to reclaim the photographic narrative. In some collages, the cut patterns reference textile-makers across the Philippine archipelago, while in other collages, shapes and silhouettes allude to a problematic colonial past.

Field Notes is a meditation upon the long, complex relationships between the Philippines and the United States, anthropology and photography, and mass media and society. By weaving historical photographs into my own contemporary art practice, I recontextualize archives that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. Ultimately, I hope that my project will contribute to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who are eager to interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all members of the Global South.

About Jason Reblando –

Jason Reblando is an artist and photographer based in Normal, Illinois. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Sociology from Boston College. He is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Politico, Camera Austria, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Marketplace, MAS Context, Real Simple, Places Journal, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader. His photographs are collected in the Library of Congress, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections, the Midwest Photographers Project of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is currently serving on the Society for Photographic Education Board of Directors (2022-2026) and is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.

The Griffin Museum is pleased to partner with Davis Orton Gallery to showcase the 13th Annual Photobook Exhibition, featuring the works of 27 talented book artists.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS AND PHOTOBOOKS
Leah Abrahams…Do You See What I See?
Steve Anderson…Surruralism Retrospective Part Two
Nancy Baron…Riders on the 10
Peter Baumgartner…Foliage
Robin Boger…Summer: A Season in Farlow Park
Shannon Davis…Controlled Burn
Jane Ebaugh & John Verner…Care Through Touch
Beth Galton…Covid Diary
Joe Greene…Ashtray
Lynn Harrison…At Peace in Nature
Jane Hopkins…Cemetery Reflections
Judi Iranyi…Arg-e-Bam
Doug Johnson…Places Faces
Laura June Kirsch…Romantic Lowlife Fantasies
Sal Taylor Kydd & Dawn Surratt…A Passing Song
Julia Kuskin…Phone Book
Flynn Larsen…Cosmic Dance
Tony Loreti…Garden in the Fens
Margaret McCarthy…Sentient
Linda Morrow…Learning to Swim
Laila Nahar…Color of Life: Old Delhi  
Dale Niles…What Lies Within
Ann Rosen…Ascending Towards Normalcy
Elliot Schildkrout…Standing in the Mirror
Jon-Marc Seimon…#kaddish
Robindeep Singh…Anywhere but Nowhere & Saddapind

David Sokosh…Things That Look Like the Moon (but are not the moon)

Thomas Whitworth…More Constructed Scenarios
Sharon Wickham…Seeing Paint with Joan

To see a full prospectus about the exhibition with extended book information and links to the artist website see the Online Catalog on the Davis Orton website.

About Karen Davis and Davis Orton Gallery

The Davis Orton Gallery, established in August, 2009, is located on historic Warren Street in Hudson, NY – an architecturally rich street famous for its antique shops, galleries and restaurants.

The Davis Orton Gallery exhibits photography, mixed media and trade and artist-published photobooks. The goal of the gallery is to present a wide range of contemporary artists – from emerging to mid-career to established.

Karen is a teacher, gallerist and photographer. For over 15 years she taught Photography Atelier, a portfolio development course and Marketing for Fine Art Photographers in the Boston area at Radcliffe Institute, Lesley University and, most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photography.

Karen is co-owner and curator of the Davis Orton Gallery. She has been an invited reviewer of portfolios at the Griffin/CAA Portfolio Reviews, Photolucida in Portland OR, FotoFest in Houston TX and Critical Mass (online/Photolucida) and Magenta Foundation’s Fence project.

Her photographs are in the collections of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, the Lishui Museum of Photography (China) and the Houghton Rare Books Library, Harvard University and can be seen at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

The Color of Water by Sarah Schorr is an investigation of one of our life sustaining elements: water. What is the color of water? Opaque, transparent or translucent, entering water can delineate both a physical passage and a metaphysical pathway. Schorr interprets these moments of transition that can open us to different reflective experiences, sparking introspection about attention, physicality, and mobility in our media-saturated landscape. Silver to black to emerald green: water is often not blue. Water changes anything and everything. Using local water drawn from Judkins Pond adjacent to the Griffin Museum, Schorr’s installation longing messages slowly shifts and drifts as the boundaries of ink, paper, image and water transform in an assortment of bottles.

About Sarah Schorr
Sarah Schorr is an American photographic artist, researcher, and educator. A captivation with light, water, and modes of embodied contemplation runs through her work.

Schorr’s work has been widely exhibited since her first solo show at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. She was selected for a Terra Foundation Fellowship (2021) and a Munn Artist Fellowship (2022) with artist-in-residency at Monet House from the Versailles Foundation in France. In 2020, Schorr’s work was honored by the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for women photographers in the category of nude (first prize) as part of an exhibition at the Fotonostrum Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. Schorr enjoys collaborating with other artists, writers, and researchers. Her artist catalogue, “Borrowed Glitter,” is accompanied by an essay from author and national book award finalist Phyllis Rose. Since earning her PhD, Schorr’s own research has been published in collected books and journals. Her book “The Color of Water,” with words by Elizabeth Avedon and Anne Marie Kragh Pahuus accompanied a (2021) solo show of her work at Galleri Image in Aarhus, Denmark and a (2022) solo show at the Northern Photographic Centre in Oulu, Finland.

Schorr received her BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University, her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts and her PhD in media studies at Aarhus University with a dissertation entitled, “Social Photography: Photographic Practices in the Context of Social Media”. Sarah currently lives in Denmark where she lives, works (and swims).

We are excited to share a short video by Sarah and her collaborators Vicente Cayuela and Jake Benzinger. Take a look at the Color of Water

Fugue States is an on-going exploration of the future legacies of photography, currently with two areas of focus: the disappearance of the physical print and the life span of digital files. For the past several decades, I have considered how photographs move through time and how they are appreciated and stored in preparation for the future. Photography is an ever-changing medium, morphing and shifting with new technologies, some profoundly impacting our ability to access our photographic histories.

As an analog photographer, I have watched my practice diminished and altered by the loss of materials and methodologies. Over the years I have collected and created hundreds of portraits, some acquired are almost a century old and it’s made me consider the formal portrait amid the shifting sands of photography, the loss of photograph as object, and most importantly, the loss of photographic legacies.

Fugue State speaks to the potential loss of the tangible photograph in future generations. I observe my children, part of the most documented generation in history, creating thousands of images for their social media outlets, but am painfully aware that they have never made a photographic print and will most likely have no physical photographs to pass down to their grandchildren. This loss of the photograph-as-object, as something tangible to be circulated through the decades, reflects the fading away of specific memories and identities, and the loss of cultural and familial histories in forms that we associate with family preservation.

The photographs created for this series sit in an in-between space of the future and the past, demonstrating the clash between images and materiality, where materiality, unfortunately, seems to be losing ground. For this project, after creating analog portraits of people in my life, I have damaged the emulsion of my negatives, wounding the film stock with a variety of chemicals. I then reinterpret the image in the digital darkroom in the original, negative state where the potential for both the restoration and erasure of memory are present. I am in fact, damaging my own photographic legacy to call attention to this shift from the physical to the visual. 

Fugue State Revisited was created after the loss of a hard drive that held 20 years of analog scans. In my attempt to recover the files, only half came back in a format that was accessible. The rest of the files were corrupted, each totally unique in how the machine damages and reinterprets the pixels. This alarming result made me begin to consider ever-shifting digital platforms and file formats, and I realized that much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility.

As an analog photographer, rather than let the machine have the last word, I have cyanotyped over my damaged digital scans. I use silhouettes of portraits from my archives to conceal and reveal the corruption. By using historical processes to create a physical object, I guarantee that this image will not be lost in the current clash between the digital file and the materiality of a photographic print.

Fugue State Revisited calls attention to the fact that today’s digital files may not retain their original state, or even exist, in the next century. The Getty Research Institute states, “While you are still able to view family photographs printed over 100 years ago, a CD with digital files on it from only 10 years ago might be unreadable because of rapid changes to software and the devices we use to access digital content.”

As we are reliant on technology to keep our images intact for future generations, it begs the question, who will maintain our hard drives after we are gone? Will we be able to conserve photographs that speak to family histories? These are important considerations for our visual futures, as we may be leaving behind photographs that will be reimagined by machines or no longer cherish physical markers of proof that we existed.

Aline Smithson (https://www.alinesmithson.com/) is a visual artist, educator, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, her work is influenced by the elevated unreal. She received a BA in art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Ruppersburg, and Charles Garabian. After a decade-long career as a New York Fashion Editor, Aline returned to Los Angeles and to her own artistic practice.

She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography,the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Jose Art Museum, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Verve Gallery in Santa Fe. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN, Communication Arts, Eyemazing, Real Simple, Los Angeles, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.

In 2007, Aline founded LENSCRATCH, a photography journal that celebrates a different contemporary photographer each day. She has been the Gallery Editor for Light Leaks Magazine, a contributing writer for Diffusion, Don’t Take Pictures, Lucida, and F Stop Magazines, has written book reviews for photo-eye, and has provided the forewords for artist’s books by Tom Chambers, Meg Griffiths, Flash Forward 12, Robert Rutoed, Nancy Baron, among others. Aline has curated and jurored exhibitions for a number of galleries, organizations, and on-line magazines, including Review Santa Fe, Critical Mass, Flash Forward, and the Griffin Museum. In addition, she is a reviewer and educator at many photo festivals across the United States. She teaches at LACP, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Maine Media Workshops and Sante Fe Workshops among others.

In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. In 2014 and 2019, Aline’s work was selected for Critical Mass Top 50 and she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Aline to a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition and in 2018 and 2019, Aline was a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and is exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She was commissioned to create the book, LOST: Los Angeles for Kris Graves Projects which released in 2019. Her books are in the collections of the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. others. She is a 2022 Hasselblad Heroine.  With the exception of her cell phone, she only shoots film.

AS