Griffin Atelier Gallery

Veiled Actualities

My photographic explorations mirror the disjointed, fragmented and conflicted nature of my personal experiences and use visual metaphors that layer textures, reflecting internal chaos and emotional turbulence.

I am inspired to explore the emotional complexity that influences visual imagery, which our brains simplify as we perceive, absorb and comprehend information. Normally our eyes see all of the visual information but our brains simplify to one or two major objects. In taking these pictures based in the real world, the camera lets us see the rich visual complexity and multiple layers that we do not conventionally perceive.

This multilayered approach is influenced by growing up in New York City where I was enthralled by shop windows, reflecting the constant activity and often chaotic moments of the city, mirroring a fleeting and mesmerizing world. To illustrate this perspective the photographs featured in this exhibition are created “in camera” as single images without multiple exposures or adding content during post-processing.

About Philip Sager –

Philip Sager is a fine art photographer who grew up in the heart of New York City, filled with experiences that only an international city can offer. He now lives across the county in another geographically small but equally urban center: San Francisco.

While his artistic work focuses on confronting the complexity of perception and how our brains simplify, absorb, and comprehend information, Sager is directly influenced by his subliminal mind, memory, and metaphors mirroring the fragmented and conflictual nature of emotive experience. It comes naturally for Sager to combine art and science, given his long academic and professional history of scientific pursuits researching the heart and the mind. Sager studied photography at MIT, Yale University, the Apeiron Workshops.

His photographs are firmly placed in the real world, as they are created “in camera” as single images without multiple exposures or added content during post-processing.
His work is in private collections and has been shown in multiple galleries.

Statement
When I was just thirteen, my world changed overnight with the sudden death of my father. My mother Barbara became the core of our little family, guiding my sister and me through grieving using faith, laughter and love. She helped us find our footing again, easing the inevitable sadness with ready hugs and encouraging words.

When I started college, I missed our physical closeness and began photographing my mother when I visited home. I always carried my camera, frequently recording moments, expressions and compositions that caught my eye. My candid photographs eventually formed an intimate narrative of our tight family bond. But it was only after my mother’s death when I was twenty-six that I realized they exposed her true gift: how to find joy after loss. Without knowing it, she had prepared me for life after her own death. I hope my images capture her grace and honor her legacy.

Bio
Sandy Hill grew up in a small town in Northeastern Ohio. She spent many hours on her horse at an old farm, or driving around with her mom looking for beautiful country settings to photograph or paint.  The natural beauty as well as the rustic farms in the area provided the inspiration for her interest in photography. In fact her first newspaper cover was taken at one of these farms and later a significant photography project revolved around an old family farm in upstate New York.

Her mom’s artistic skills encouraged a constant stream of creativity in Sandy’s childhood. Other influences included Sandy’s father who traveled the world for his work and inspired a curiosity about other people and countries.

Her current work in portraiture has grown out of her interest in illustrating the stories of different people and cultures.

Hill was a photographer for several daily newspapers and a wire service in the greater Boston area. She was also a public relations photographer for the University of Rochester.

Her work has been exhibited in multiple juried shows including several by the Griffin Museum and The Curated Fridge. The South X Southeast Gallery, Lenscratch, RIT Honor Show and The Center for Fine Art Photography have also included her work in juried exhibits.

Statement
Started during my artist-in-residence in upstate New York in July 2019, these series build on my experiments of layering cyanotype techniques with overprinting and inks to reveal a deeper meaning. Working intuitively, I add acrylic paints and brush marks to achieve a rich tapestry that hovers between figurative form and fluid abstract shapes. Thus, the photographs transform into complex organic life forms not unlike the ever-shifting appearance of the Blue Morpho butterfly that inspired the name of this body of work.

An exploration of form, line and color, these meditations in cyanotype and acrylic are foremost about a melding of deliberate photography and expressive painterly gestures. During the pandemic-enforced solitude of 2020, however, the intent of the series morphed as well, to focus increasingly on my environmental and societal concerns, while maintaining the style and technique of the series. Contemplating each fresh cyanotype, a shape might remind me of a specific problem; I would then interact with the piece as if to write an essay with paint and pen.

Bio
I’m a photographer with a background in science and a love for conceptual work.

Environmental and social issues became a focus of my photographic practice during an artist-in-residence at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, NY. My series ‘Gaia,’ which takes on environmental destruction, was completed later that same year and was exhibited in ReachArts Gallery, Swampscott, MA.

During the summer of 2020, I continued to investigate how to personally engage with important social issues. My photos of local decisive events surrounding political and pandemic flashpoints led to a window installation (‘Facts of Life’, GALA – Galleries at Lynn Arts – in downtown Lynn, MA). Between December 2020 and March 2021, I worked on and was solely responsible for a process art installation called ‘Metamorphosis XX’ (also at GALA). This full-room immersive installation focused on harnessing and celebrating mental resilience and strength in the face of the pandemic.

I have previously had solo exhibits in 2017 at ReachArts Gallery, Swampscott, MA (2017), and at Marblehead Arts Association in Marblehead, MA (2019). My work has been featured in The Daily Item newspaper (Lynn, MA), Marblehead Wicked Local newspaper, 01907 The Magazine (Swampscott lifestyle magazine), Photofan (French photography magazine) and several other publications. I am currently a board member of the local non-profit Galleries at Lynn Arts and I am in my second year of leading a group on Creative Photography for the Greater Lynn Photographic Association. – ST

View Stefanie’s website.

About Watching the Ice Melt

Watching The Ice Melt is a body of work utilizing cameraless abstraction with the cyanotype process to address issues of climate change through themes of glacial ice melt, memory, and loss. This work asks the viewer to consider the urgency of the climate crisis, even when faced with a global pandemic and social unrest.

Over the past several years, as I watched reports of the climate crisis getting worse, pushing past the point of no return, with extreme weather events, floods, wildfires, rising global temperatures, and more … I felt helpless. I started to create abstract images of various forms of ordinary ice melting on sensitized cyanotype paper to process my feelings. I watched the ice melt by the heat of the sun, the resulting water mixing with the chemistry, swirling and pooling, thinking of the massive mountain glaciers rapidly disappearing, sea levels rising, things that have been and will never be again, of a changing planet that will be my children’s future.

The images from this project have been described as haunting, a word that adequately describes the disappearing glaciers and this dying planet. They are cameraless abstractions utilizing elemental sources such as ice and the sun in conjunction with the 19th-century cyanotype photographic process.

This project has been generously supported by the A.R.T. Fellowship from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation.

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Bio
Zachary P. Stephens (b. Brattleboro, VT, 1983) is a visual artist and educator specializing in photographic processes.

He received his MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a certificate in professional photography from the Hallmark Institute of Photography. Before dedicating his life to art and arts education, he was a professional photojournalist with work appearing in; The New York Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Burlington Free Press, Vermont Life Magazine, The Brattleboro Reformer, and many more.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with the Photographic Exploration Project in Berlin, Germany, Gabba Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Candela Gallery in Richmond, VA, Woody Gaddis Photographic Arts Gallery in Oklahoma, Kayafas Gallery in Boston, MA, Dianich Gallery in Brattleboro, VT, and the Snyder Gallery in Marlboro, VT. Stephens was also recently named a finalist in Photolucida’s 2020 Critical Mass and awarded the A.R.T. Fellowship from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation.

Currently, he is an adjunct professor of photography at Springfield College and Franklin Pierce University. Additionally, he has taught at Keene State College, Landmark College, the Community College of Vermont, The Putney School, and the In-Sight Photography Project. He is an active member of the Society for Photographic Education.

View Zachary’s Website.

Statement
For those without roots in a place, memory is essential to maintain a sense of continuity in life. Isabel Allende

Historias fragmentadas is a visual journal that I created over the course of five years. It was fueled by a sentiment of longing and nostalgia after the death of my grandmother, the family story keeper in 2015. This event brought me to look deeper into my past; to explore the paradox of memory and the emotion of loss as a way to reconnect with my Peruvian roots and honor those who came before me.

In this series, I create digital photo collages that unsettle the images of the past in a way that allows me to look through the cracks. By tearing, juxtaposing and layering archival family photographs, fragments from my journals, and objects from my childhood, I have shed light on a personal story within an ancestral story that spans generations. I also use staged imagery, mostly self-portraits, to explore moments in my life where I have inhabited liminal spaces, moments of transition and experiences of displacement, both physical and psychological.

This work tells the story of a particular middle-class Peruvian family through my own lens. I have chosen, with these images and writings, to release the voices and the haunting self-discovery that happened when I explored the stories behind iconic family photographs and their legends through my own personal mythology. – CRG

Bio
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian visual artist based in Massachusetts whose practice engages photography, assemblage, poetry and artist book making. Her work is mainly autobiographical and self-reflective; her cross-cultural experience and Peruvian heritage deeply inform her art making. Claudia’s latest projects explore the stories of her Peruvian ancestors and aspects of her immigrant and liminal experiences.

View Claudia’s website.

View Mark Feeney’s review in the Boston Globe.

View What Will You Remember’s Review.

Statement
From the first day I began to make photographs seriously, I was drawn to creating abstract images.  Using black and white film, I initially photographed in the manner of Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, seeking the abstract in reality:  weatherworn rocks, torn bits of paper stapled to telephone poles, bare twigs breaching deep snow.  I must have succeeded in this endeavor because people often did not recognize the thing I had photographed. This was satisfying because I had helped them see something in a different way.

In the past several years, however, I found I’d grown restless; no longer content hunting abstracts in the real world, I wanted to create them myself.  Photograms and cliché-verre prints, where my drawings serve as negatives in the darkroom, seemed the perfect photographic processes for this pursuit.  I could play and experiment with objects, lines, papers, shapes, light, shadow, texture, size, and depth in the darkroom to construct my own abstract creations. To paraphrase one of my heroes, the artist Dorothea Rockburne, I wanted to create images that were of themselves and not about something else.

The mysterious ability of abstraction to move the human heart and mind has always fascinated me.  When I photograph a beautiful tree I understand why people respond.  After all, it’s a beautiful tree.  When I create a photographic image of a simple circle bisected by a line I have no understanding why it moves me or others, but it can.  I love the cryptic nature of the conversation between art and human emotion.  Agnes Martin spent a lifetime creating her simple, mesmerizing, rectangular grid paintings in an effort to depict happiness on a canvas.  What a glorious pursuit, and she captured it with a simple rectangle!

In the work shown here, all created in the past two years, I have been exploring geometric abstraction, trying to figure out what I might create with just lines, circles, triangles and squares.  The process is completely intuitive.  I add and subtract shapes and layers, lines and forms, patterns and textures, until somehow it seems right.  When the image feels complete I stop and move on.  The exciting and wonderful thing about creating geometric abstracts is the possibilities are infinite. A simple circle can spawn endless images.  I guess I’ll be at this for some time to come. Patricia A. Bender ~ January 2021

Bio
Patricia A. Bender is a photo-based visual artist living and working in New Jersey and Michigan. She began studying photography in the early 2000s, and was hooked from the moment she shot and developed her first image. She works exclusively in the darkroom with black and white media, and personally creates each image from the moment it is conceived through the finished gelatin silver print.  She has recently added drawing to her artistic practice, and often uses her drawings as paper negatives in the darkroom to create unique cliché-verre prints.

Statement
Webster defines concealed as “to place out of sight, to conceal evidence, carrying a concealed weapon, to prevent disclosure or recognition or conceal the truth”.

At one time or another, everyone has something to conceal, emotionally or materially. When we place an object in our pockets and purses, we conceal it from public view. Just as easliy, we may decide to put a smile on our face even when we disagree with one another.

Joe’s photographs of vintage purses and toy guns act as a metaphor for the secrets we keep from each other and the fear in America right now.

Bio
Starting out as a painter, Joe was encouraged by his public school teachers to spend class time studying painting at an artist’s studio in Harvard Square, Cambridge. Since the studio specialized in copying classic contemporary works of arts, Joe had to learn how to paint just like the masters; including using a stick to drip paint Pollock style. He says, “Painting the same paintings over and over again helped me understand how light, color and textures work together.”

When he couldn’t get his ideas onto canvas fast enough, Joe picked up a camera. By the time he reached high school, he had a darkroom, two clients and was studying with artist and cinematographer, Ken Brown. Joe also learned the art of the psychedelic light show, by helping out at the Boston Tea Party concert hall. “I had a front row seat ( from the light show booth ) for Cream, Led Zepplin and the J Geils Band,”said Greene.

College was an exercise that broadened Joe’s horizons, it was at Mass College of Art where he became an honor student as a dual major in graphic design and photography, studying with the teaching team of Gus Kayafas and the late Paul Muller.
“I can spend years studying a subject, genre or lifestyle. My recent book, “Bike Week”, covers 5 years of shooting portraits at Laconia Bike Week. Other book titles include “Track”; the last few live race days at Suffolk Downs, Wolf; photographs of legendary rocker Peter Wolf and a new collection of found objects entitiled “Shiny Things,” Greene said.

Joe Greene’s exhibitions include: