Griffin Atelier Gallery

On October 11, 2017, the Griffin Museum opens with “Gray Matters,” an exhibition of photographs by Marina Font, Francie Bishop Good, Sandra Klein, J. Fredric May, Liz Steketee and Colleen Woolpert. This exhibition is shown under the overarching title called “Gray Matters” and opens during FlashPoint Boston. Six solo exhibits will be featured in the Main Gallery, Atelier Gallery and the Griffin Gallery of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.

J. Fredric May, in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin, will exhibit “Apparition: Postcards from Eye See You” and Liz Steketee, will exhibit “Sewn” in the Griffin Gallery. Francie Bishop Good exhibits “Comus,” Marina Font’s exhibit is called “Mental Maps, Colleen Woolpert exhibits pieces from her series “Persistence of Vision” and Sandra Klein exhibits photographs from her “Noisy Brain” series.

“Gray Matters” will showcase at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA from October 11 – December 3, 2017. An opening reception takes place on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 7 – 8:30 p.m. There will be a gallery walk with the artists at 5:45 PM on October 11, 2017.  In SoWa Boston for FlashPoint Boston through January three 48″x48″ sidewalk color vinyls will be on view featuring Francie Bishop Good, Sandra Klein and Marina Font photographs.

“Assembling the “Gray Matters” exhibition came out of a personal realization that none of us escape the aging process,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “As an aging female and as the daughter of a parent with dementia, I’ve had first hand experience of how our culture regards its elderly. I wanted an exhibition that started conversations on the value of elders coupled with a focus on how the brain influences a quality of life. Gray matter includes the regions of the brain that are the nuts and bolts of muscle control, memory, speech, perception, hearing and emotions.”

In “Noisy Brain,” Sandra Klein examines her 21^st century brain that is constantly analyzing the world around her. She also hopes to understand the universal mind. She says, “As I watch my mother experience dementia, I am stunned by the changes in the aging brain.  In creating a narrative that focuses on layers of thinking, I ponder the noises that are yet to come.”

Sandra Klein was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and received a BFA from Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA and an MA in printmaking from San Diego State University. After working as a teacher, her art focus moved from printmaking into mixed media and fine art photography. Her practice involves conceptual imagery that explores memory and personal narratives. Her layered, often three dimensional photographs have been shown across the United States in venues such as the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, Candela Gallery in Virginia, A Smith Gallery in Texas, Tilt Gallery in Arizona, Southeast Center of Photography in North Carolina, and Building Bridges, Arena 1 Gallery and the Los Angeles Center of Photography in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured on Lenscratch, A Photo Editor, Musee Magazine, What Will You Remember, and in Diffusion magazine, and is held in public collections. She will be in a four-person show at the California Museum of Art, Thousand Oaks in September 2017. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Marina Font couples exploration of the human mind with female identity. Using metaphoric means she considers the biologic, psychological and social aspects of the female body and the intersections of these planes. She says, “With this series, I aim to approach what lies beyond control and reason, exploring, through the act of drawing with thread, embroidery, fabric and appropriated crochet pieces onto the photographic surface, the intricate mysteries of the psyche. Through these works I intend to shed imaginary light on the female experience in order to build idealized and fantastical connections to the forces of the unconscious.”

Born and raised in Argentina, Marina Font studied design at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Martin Malharro, Mar del Plata, Argentina. In the summer of 1998 she studied photography at Speos Ecole de la Photogrphie in Paris, followed by completing her MFA in Photography at Barry University, Miami in 2009. For the past ten years she’s has been working on photo-based works that explore issues of identity, gender, territory, language and the forces of the unconscious. Her work is held in several collections including the MDC Museum of Art + Design, Miami, The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, The Boca Raton Museum of Art, The Girls’ Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale, The Bunnen Collection, Atlanta, FoLA, Fototeca Latinoamericana de Fotografia, Buenos Aires, Argentina and various important private collections around the world.

She has exhibited in numerous one-person and group shows in galleries, cultural institutions and museums including The Boca Raton Museum of Art (with RPM Projects), The Consulate General of Argentina in New York, The Deering Estate at Cutler, Miami The Appleton Museum, The Museum of Florida Art, The Nova South Eastern University, The Baker Museum, The Art Center South Florida and the Andy Gato Gallery at Barry University to name a few. She just had her fourth solo show at the Dina Mitrani Gallery, Miami. She lives and works in Miami Beach, Florida since 1997 and is represented by the Dina Mitrani Gallery.

Francie Bishop Good uses “a staccato of media” to create “a hybrid form of portraiture.” She begins with images from her mother’s and her yearbooks. She and her mother went to the same high school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The artist says, “I cross-pollinate painting, photography, drawing, and collage with digital layering. The source material of photographs from yearbooks is something very personal yet universal. I am transforming the imagined. “Comus” was and still is the title of the yearbooks from Allentown High School.”

Born in Bethlehem, PA, Good lives and works in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, Europe and Latin America and is included in public and private collections in the US. Her work has appeared in publications, including The Miami Herald, Art in America, and ARTnews, among others. She is represented by David Castillo Gallery in Miami, FL. Francie Bishop Good did her undergraduate work at Philadelphia College of Art, received her BFA at the University of Boulder and her Masters at Florida Atlantic College.

In 2012 J. Fredric May experienced an aortic aneurysm. His sight was irreversibly altered losing 46% of his vision rendering him legally blind. His limited vision did not stop him from producing artwork. Independent curator J. Sybylla Smith says that May’s photographs are “a hybrid of analog and digital processes that are the result of his explorations.” Additionally she says, “May begins with vintage portraits which he scans and puts through data corruption software. He then creates layered composites and prints these as cyanotypes. He bleaches and tones his cyanotypes with a mixture of photo chemicals and tea. Ultimately, he digitizes the altered cyanotypes and creates an archival pigment print.”

Fredric May is a former photojournalist and filmmaker who has traveled all over the world, telling visual stories with a signature style of bold color and confrontational composition. He resides in Palm Springs, CA with his wife.

Liz Steketee uses family photographs to speak on identity and truth telling. She deconstructs, cuts and rebuilds photographs into personas with newly conceived histories, narratives and characteristics. Memories and truth become distorted with her use of threads, everyday moments from her life, photomontage and juxtaposition. She says of her work, “I break the rules of traditional photography by mixing elements and materials that do not necessarily belong together. I allow subjects to express emotions or information long repressed, causing a shift in expectations. Finally, I explore the traditions of sewing and photography colliding and establishing new ground. This work carries subtexts for me such as, the notion of truth in photography, the connection between photographs and memories, and the visual history and impact of the tradition of portraiture.”

A resident of San Francisco, Stekette lives with her husband and two children. She maintains her own art practice and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute where she graduated with an MFA and received the prestigious John Collier Award. In 2011, Nazraeli Press published Steketee’s work in a One Picture Book, Dystopia.

Colleen Woolpert’s “Persistence of Vision” includes photography, video, and interactive objects and installations that explore how we visualize the unseen and navigate the unknown. The Griffin Museum chose to highlight three artworks from this series.

Colleen Woolpert is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, photo educator, and stereograph specialist based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She creates still and moving images as well as interactive objects and installations that explore the nuances of vision—from visual perception itself to abstract concepts like imagination, wonder, and doubt.

Recipient of both an Individual Artist Grant and a Community Arts Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), other recognition includes Juror’s Selection from Darren Ching (Klomching Gallery) in Same But Different at the New York Center for Photographic Art and a Top Knots Award from Photo District News. Her work has been curated into exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Humble Arts Foundation, Dumbo Arts Center, and Light Work, among other venues, and her editorial photographs have appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Bicycling, Martha Stewart Weddings, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Colleen received her MFA from Syracuse University and BA from Western Michigan University, where she currently teaches in the Photography and Intermedia Department.

Rocio de Alba poses in a series of humorous and processed self-portraits, which shows us different contemporary mothers in current modern families. Current statistics confirm that the diversity of family structures are affected by many situations including the rise in divorce rate, interracial unions and legalization of same sex marriages. These statistics support the change in the mother prototype.

By taking humorous and dynamic self-portraits, Rocio explores what mothers should look like in the progression of the “modern family”. Statistically, the diversity of modern family structures is caused by divorce. She uses these facts and her own experiences as a base to her concerns and questions.

De Alba’s ongoing series, “Honor Thy Mother,” is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography from June 6^st through September 3^rd, 2017. An opening reception will take place on July 13^th, 2017 from 7-8:30PM. Event is free and open to the public.

Rocio de Alba shares, “In my early twenties my pious old fashion Hispanic parents divorced. Years later they confessed their most devoted accomplishments were sparing us the un-pleasantries associated with step-parents. Yet almost immediately my mother began a relationship with a man… and my father courted many women. Baffled, I witnessed my strict marital ethics unravel through the adults that enforced them and seamlessly integrated into what is referred to as the “modern family”.” In these self-portraits, de Alba uses props and minor Photoshop edits to transform herself into these numerous characters which “[focus] on the gamut of the contemporary mother archetype. Rocio herself has undergone broken relationships and separated children. She says, “As the evolution of a progressive family dynamic ensued, it revolutionized societal doctrines that enforced what mothers should look like and instead made mothers reinvent themselves unconventionally and with disregard to social biases.”

Rocio de Alba is a fine art, multimedia and conceptual photographer based in Queens, New York. She received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts and is an award winning book designer and handmade book instructor. Her work has been featured on many platforms including CNN Photos, New York Magazine, and the New York Times Lens. Her work has been part of different group exhibitions including at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon, and at the Vermont Center of Photography. Her handmade book has earned a finalist position and was displayed at the Festival Documental in Barcelona. On April 2017, the book was also selected for the INFOCUS Exhibition of Self-Published Photo Books at the Phoenix Art Museum.

April 26, 2017 (Winchester, MA) “Faded Elegants,” are photographs of objects that throughout the years have been left to decay; objects that have lost their “nobility or usefulness”. Even in their deterioration though, Wilson sees them as metaphors of the past, artifacts that were once important and beautiful.

Wilson’s series,“Faded Elegants,” is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography from June 1^st through July 4^th, 2017. An opening reception will take place on June 8^th, 2017 from 7-8:30PM. Event is free and open to the public.

In Wilson’s statement, he thoroughly explains image by image that “The tattered dictionaries [in the photographs] are perhaps metaphors for the precarious state of printed reference material. The amazingly dog-eared pages of these books convey decades of utility as tools for crossword puzzle solving.” Some objects in the photographs refer to historical places. For example Wilson explains, “Writing on the Wall, taken at Old Schwamb Mill, shows the marks of where a worker penciled important measurements on a wooden wall board for the factory note-taking in the late nineteenth century.”

Wilson’s photographic process and analysis is of much importance in the finalized photograph. Wilson explains, “One extremely satisfying aspect of making photographs is my continuing late career growth in skill and vision. Paintings inform my visual literacy in the same way classical photographs do. [These visual references] obscure the boundaries between painting and photography.”

Timothy Wilson has had a dual career as an educator and fine art photographer. In 1966, Wilson received a bachelor’s degree in English at Boston University. He later received his master degree in Education at Antioch Graduate Center for Education. He then began his career as an elementary and secondary teacher and administrator in local public schools. He was also a curriculum specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Education. For several years, he taught both English and darkroom photography. Simultaneously he was also working on his personal photo projects. He built his own darkrooms where he printed both color and black and white photos. During this work trajectory, he also taught himself how to mount, mat and frame his own work. Timothy Wilson has had solo exhibitions including, the Field Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard. Wilson has been part of many group shows, such as Galatea Fine Art Gallery, Cambridge Art Association, Panopticon Gallery and “People of Somerville: Portraits and Lives” at the Somerville Museum in 1989, where he was also recipient of a Municipal Arts Grant. Timothy has recently been honored at the Cambridge Art Association, where he continues to host critiques for artists.

 

In Quarries of New England, Steven Keirstead creates photographic diptychs and triptychs of abandoned rock quarries in the six New England states. Most of the early stone quarries ceased operations due to a change in construction techniques and road materials and the quarries reverted to a natural state. The last active New England quarry closed in 1963.

Keirstead’s series, Quarries of New England, is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography from April 6^th through May 28^th, 2017. An opening reception will take place on Sunday, April 9^th, 2017 from 4-6 PM. Keirstead will do an informal talk on his exhibition at 3:15 PM on April 9, 2017.

Keirstead says that his photo series “documents the rebirth of abandoned quarries as something else, as wildness reclaims what industry left behind.” He goes on to say that, “Slowly, human alterations to the landscape were obscured, but not erased. Vegetation grew back, open pits filled with water, iron and steel tools rusted, and wooden derricks rotted.”

Steven Keirstead was born in Saigon, lived Chiang-Mai, Thailand with his family for several years and all returned to their North Carolina hometown of Brevard. Keirstead received a B.A. in Biology/Art and Art History as well as a BFA from Rice University in Houston, Texas. Currently, Keirstead works as a biologist at Harvard University’s Knowles Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories, supporting labs in Life Sciences. He resides in Boston.

Steven exhibited in the group show Light and Vision 2 at the Rice Media Center during FotoFest 2010, in Fresh Works at Flash Forward Festival Boston 2011, in New England Scapes in 2011 at Gallery Seven in Maynard, Massachusetts, and at auctions for the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University. Steven organized a solo exhibit of his Quarries of New England portfolio at The Blue Hill Public Library in Maine in June 2015, and recently showed triptychs of Boston alleyways at night in the group exhibit Night Becomes Us at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Keirstead avidly continues his photographic endeavors.

The second install of Found in Collection: Contemporary Photography from the Danforth Art Museum Permanent Collection will be presented in two parts at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Both paintings and photographs will be exhibited, including work by John Brook, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Julie Melton, Jesseca Ferguson, Samuel Quinn, David Prifti, Jaclyn Kain, Molly Lamb, Gail Samuelson, and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, among others. The first install of exhibitions took place at the Griffin Museum of Photography during the month of December 2016. In Part Two Memory will be shown in the Atelier Gallery and Mirrors will be exhibited in the Griffin Gallery as part of Found in Collection: Contemporary Photography from the Danforth Art Museum Permanent Collection from March 9th through March 31st, 2017. An opening reception will take place on March 9, 2017 from 6:30-8:30pm. The will be a curator’s talk, with Roscio on March 16, 2017 at 7 PM at the Griffin Museum.

“Memory and absence wind their way through the second part of Danforth Art’s two-part exhibition Found in Collection,” writes Jessica Roscio, curator for the Danforth Art Museum. “Imagined travel narratives, lost places, and remembered spaces are envisioned in photographs, paintings, and drawings from the late nineteenth century to today…… [and] is apparent in works throughout this exhibition,” she says. Roscio goes on to say that the works in Mirror “comment on the surreal aspects of one’s interior life, and its collision with an often fantastical and disturbing reality. In turbulent, uncertain times, the allure of an alternate reality, or simply the belief in illusion, appeals to our need for escapism.”

In “A Story of Rose’s,” Larry Volk tells the story of his mother, Rosette Volk, a Holocaust survivor. He explores his mother’s life experiences during and after the Holocaust as an act of remembrance and investigation.

Volk’s series, “A Story of Rose’s,” is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography as part of “Legacy. Migration. Memory.” from January from January 12th through March 5th, 2017. An opening reception will take place on January 14thth, 2017 from 7-8:30pm.

Volk explains, “As an artist I am interested in personal narratives, not as ends unto themselves but rather, as vehicles for larger ideas that extend beyond the life of a particular individual. The exploration of my mother’s complex story finds identity, loss, adaptation and rebuilding.”

Larry Volk is an artist, educator, lecturer and author. He received his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently, Volk is a professor of photography in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Endicott College. Volk has lectured on subjects like digital imaging, portfolio production and art practice. He has served as a portfolio reviewer and juror to multiple national photo competitions.

As an artist, Volk has been in numerous group shows including the Flash Forward Festival and “[Photo]gogues 2014.” Most recently he has had a solo exhibition at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. Volk’s work is included in private and museum collections.

Volk has also served as president of the Endicott College Faculty association and has now been a member of the Executive Board of the Association since 2007.

Found in Collection
Contemporary Photography from the Danforth Art Museum Permanent Collection

Less than a decade after the public announcement of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot issued the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs, The Pencil of Nature, released in volumes from 1844-1846. The reproduction of the photographic image for commercial publication was significant, for it illustrated myriad ways in which photography could be used and applied to everyday life—among them, an illustration of the natural world, a document of ordinary people, places, and experiences, and a way to capture and preserve what was difficult to observe with the naked eye.

Photography became part of the public imagination in concert with the mid-nineteenth century’s interest in vision and representation. The production of photographic images and their relative availability to a widening audience democratized how one was represented and experienced the world around them in a way that a painting did not. The proliferation of photography created a visual record that purported to show things as they were, although that interpretation has always been in the eye of the photographer and viewer. Contemporary photography continues traditions established in the early years of the medium, a desire to create a complex visual narrative, tell untold stories, and make unexpected connections with ordinary spaces and places.

Found in Collection also comments on the found vernacular object, repurposed when the photographer imbues new meaning in the image. In this vein, everyday spaces—storefronts, houses, hallways, cemeteries—gain new context when inserted into the narrative of contemporary photography. This exhibition, one of two parts, explores the role of the photograph as a recorder of the observed world and contributes to the photographic narrative through the lens of select works from the museum’s permanent collection.