Griffin Main Gallery 2

Artist Statement
This Is Bliss is a transmedia narrative project investigating the vanishing roadside geography and culture of a rural Idaho town named Bliss. The project is philosophically rooted in a broad consideration of how entrenched mythologies of place and traditional mythologies of happiness collide, and are frequently confounded, in a location that bears a complex narrative of booms and busts and reflects the complicated history of American Idealism and Manifest Destiny.

The richly complex historical significance of Bliss is evidenced by its positioning on the Oregon Trail, its emergence as a town during the construction of the first railroads in the continental US, its positioning on the Snake River Valley, which was investigated photographically by the likes of Timothy O’ Sullivan and Ansel Adams and hosts the site of daredevil Evel Knievel’s failed attempt to jump a gorge with his motorcycle in 1974, as well as being the home town of Holden Bowler, the inspirational namesake for J.D. Salinger’s quintessential malcontent Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”. Bliss’ apex, however, came in the mid-20th century during the height of road trip America and only began to diminish when Interstate-84 was constructed, redirecting vehicular traffic away from a once thriving community. As a result, Bliss has been in slow economic decline ever since, a familiar story plaguing small towns in America for decades. All that remains in Bliss is two gas stations, a small school, a church, a diner, and two saloons to service its 300 current residents. Through a varied response to its contemporary landscape and inhabitants, This Is Bliss contrasts romantic visions of the American West with its contemporary reality and considers how the heights of idealism are obtained on both a personal and cultural level.

Bio
Jon Horvath is an interdisciplinary artist routinely employing systems-based strategies within transmedia narrative projects. He received his MFA in Photography from UW-Milwaukee in 2008, and a BAS in both English Literature and the History of Philosophy from Marquette University in 2001.

Horvath’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows at venues including: The Print Center (Philadelphia), FIESP Cultural Centre (Sao Paolo, Brazil), Gyeonggi Art Center (Suwon, South Korea), OFF Piotrkowska (Lodz, Poland), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland), the Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee), INOVA (Milwaukee), Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati), Johalla Projects (Chicago), and The Alice Wilds (Milwaukee). His work is currently held in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Haggerty Museum of Art, and is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Horvath currently teaches in the New Studio Practice program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design

Review What Will You Remember

PHOTOGRAPHY ATELIER 25 EXHIBITION

February 12, 2017 (Winchester, MA) — The Photography Atelier 25 will present an exhibit of student artwork from March 9th to March 31, 2017. The Atelier is a course for intermediate and advanced photographers offered by the Griffin Museum of Photography. You are invited to come view the photographs at the Griffin Museum, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, MA 01890.

On Thursday, March 9th, the public is invited to attend the artists’ opening night reception from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Griffin Museum.

Photography Atelier Instructor and Photographer Meg Birnbaum shared, “The Photography Atelier has such a long and rich history, I’m honored to be leading this workshop for emerging photographers with Amy Rindskopf assisting. The talent among the 12 members of this group show is varied and inspiring — from our relationship with nature to memory, portraits, poetry and architecture — the show is very satisfying feast for the eyes and soul.”

Work by 2017 Photography Atelier 25 members includes:
Amy Rindskopf: Terra Novus, discovers territory unseen by the casual observer. Akari Hosokawa: Silhouette, articulates a Japanese minimalist aesthetic derived from Zen philosophy that too much information prevents us from seeing the essence of objects, ideas and the real beauty behind them. Cynthia Johnson: While You Sleep is a series of landscapes showcasing night photography. Donna Tramontozzi: Regarding Bhutan examines the people of Bhutan as they go about their everyday lives. Gregory Jundanian: The Spoken Word, is meant to be a visual open-mic into the Boston area poetry community. James Hunt: Lost in the Water by James Hunt explores the experience of losing one’s self through immersion during a time of personal struggle. Kevin Ting uses unique methods to capture unseen perspectives. Over Familiar utilizes drones, while Depth Perception uses the technique of stereoscopic photography. Lisa Neville Ambler: Le Quai des brumes brings us back to the days of film noir with the dramatic facial lighting. Mark Levinson: Extracts of the Ordinary reveals curious fragments of commonplace public spaces. Meghan Cronin: La Familia observes the importance of family and the continuation of tradition. David J. Poorvu: After Hours shows us that while many small town business districts are failing, they continue to offer places to live, shop, and conduct the business of everyday life. Tonee
Harbert: Dispatches From Terra Incognita (latin “unknown land”) a project where photographs are like clues from a dream, re-assembled to comprehend a world obscured through distant memory and interpretation.

About the class:
Photography Atelier, in its twenty-first year, is a unique portfolio-making course for emerging to advanced photographers. In addition to guidance and support in the creation of a body of work, the class prepares artists to market, exhibit, and present their work to industry professionals.

Each participant in the Photography Atelier presents a final project in the form of a print portfolio, a photographic book or album, a slide show, or a mixed media presentation. In every Photography Atelier, students hang a gallery exhibition and produce work for their own pages on the Atelier website. To see the photography of present and past Atelier students and teachers, please visit www.photographyatelier.org. Instructor Meg Birnbaum will be happy to discuss the Photography Atelier at the reception on March 9th with anyone interested in joining the class.

The Photography Atelier was conceived by Holly Smith Pedlosky in 1996 and taught by Karen Davis for 7 years. The workshop was previously offered at Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard University and Lesley Seminars and in the Seminar Series in the Arts, The Art Institute of Boston (AIB), both at Lesley University.

On January 12, 2016, the Griffin Museum opens with “Beyond the Forest,” an exhibition of photographs by Loli Kantor. This exhibition is shown under the overarching idea of “Legacy. Migration. Memory.”. Two solo exhibits by Loli Kantor and Rosemarie Zens will be featured in the Main Gallery of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. Rosemarie Zens’ body of work is called “The Sea Remembers.”

Larry Volk, in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin, will exhibit “A Story of Rose’s” and Priya Kambli, will exhibit “Kitchen Gods” in the Griffin Gallery. These two artists are also exhibiting work under the “Legacy, Migration. Memory.” umbrella.

“Beyond the Forest” and “The Sea Remembers” will showcase at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA from January 12 – March 5, 2017. An opening reception takes place on Saturday, January 14, 2017, 7 – 8:30 p.m.

Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography, says of the exhibitions, “The backdrop of family history and its memories inform identity. Through photographs the artists of “Legacy. Migration. Memory.” share familial resettlement stories. Customs, culture and the individual journeys vary but at heart, the passage to the present is all rooted in legacy.”

In “Beyond the Forest,” Loli Kantor explores personal and cultural memory. As the daughter of holocaust survivors, Kantor visited Poland and Ukraine from 2004 until 2012. Kantor says that she “documents the lives of the disappearing population of Holocaust survivors and the reemergence of Jewish life beginning to slowly transform some of the communities in Poland and Ukraine today.” Loli lost both of her parents by the time she was fourteen.

Kantor uses a variety of photographic processes to tell her story. She says that in “using color photographs to examine home life, religion and tradition, Jewish lives and rituals emerge as vibrant and colorful representations of struggle, identity, and strength.” Kantor also says she “uses black and white prints to reveal another layer in one’s consciousness about Jewish presence and absence there.” Her small intimate works in palladium “show little stories, similar to snap shots, referring back to a timeless look at a people and a culture. They also create a private space in which she could process the emotional impacts that this world unveiled to me.”

Born in Paris, France and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, Kantor emigrated to the U.S. in 1984 and lives in Fort Worth Texas. Kantor’s work has won numerous awards, including Critical Mass top 50, PhotoNOLA Reviewers choice award and Lishui award of excellence for her solo exhibition in Lishui, China. Her photographs are in private and museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Lishui Museum of Photography in China and Lviv National Museum in Ukraine, among others.
Kantor’s monograph “Beyond The Forest: Jewish Presence in Eastern Europe, 2004-2012”, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2014. The book is available in our gift shop and online.

Robert Rindler manufactures sculptures from remains and detritus found in the Outer Cape’s transfer stations. He collects, cleans and assembles the objects he finds into categories based on color, shape and use so viewers have the opportunity to experience and reconsider the objects in a new context. As an installation artist who works within different mediums such as sculpture, photography, printmaker, designer, collector, and educator, Rindler demonstrates these skills with a playful installation of Jetsam Jellyfish.

Rindler’s Jetsam Jellyfish, is featured in the Main Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography April 9th through June 5th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on April 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Jerry Takigawa will lead an artist talk and gallery tour of the Main Gallery exhibition False Food at 6:00pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. The Griffin Museum will be free to all visitors on April 22nd, 2015 in celebration of Earth Day.

With a distinct eye for color, his jellyfish creations aim to ignite dialog “between chaos and order, beauty and danger, humor and gravity, idea and action and color and form,” states Rindler, “I am consistently intrigued by the man-made detritus our society designs and manufactures and is then discarded to live on in our environment forever.”

A graduate of Cooper Union and the Yale School of Architecture, Rindler has had a long and prominent career as an artist, curator and art educator, having served as president of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, Associate Provost of The Rhode Island School of Design, Dean of Students at the Boston Architectural Center, and Art Department Chairman at the University of Vermont. He is now a full-time resident of Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Magdalena Solé is a social documentary photographer living in New York and now Vermont. She is known for her sensitive expressions of culture through distinctive color artistry. Her photographic projects span the globe from the Mississippi Delta to Japan and Cuba.

Solé’s series, Mississippi Delta, is featured in the Main Gallery at the Griffin Museum January 8 through March 1, 2015. An opening reception with the artists takes place on January 10, 7-8:30 p.m. Magdalena Solé has a gallery talk and tour of Mississippi Delta at 4:00 PM. Brandon Thibodeaux has a gallery talk and tour of When Morning Comes at 5 PM. Bryan David Griffith has a members’ talk on his exhibition The Last Bookstores at 6:15 PM. The talks are FREE.

“My work is about communities at the edge of society,” says Magdalena Solé. “My photographs describe brief moments of human existence, carried by the rhythm of a setting. They convey what is at once simple and vast, passing and constant, ordinary and intangible. What inspires my photographs is light and the hidden spaces it illuminates, especially in immigrant and working class communities.”

“Mississippi Delta is an exploration of the iconic region lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers running from Memphis, TN to Vicksberg, MS, a place that evokes visions of sharecroppers, plantations and of course, the sound of the Blues,” says Solé. “A small wealthy gentry and a large impoverished underclass lives in dilapidated houses and tilted trailers. Its community is very conscious of its own identity and its racial diversity.”

“Solé photographs are rich in color and character,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “And every image is rendered with respect and dignity.”

A book entitled New Delta Rising, distributed by the University Press of Solé’s Mississippi Delta images was published in 2011. The book received the Silver Award at PX3 Prix de la Photographie, France in 2011. Most recently Mississippi Delta has been selected as a PDN Photo Annual 2011 Finalist. Magdalena Solé is also winner of the Silver Prize 2011 at Slow Exposures, Concord, GA.

Solé founded TransImage, a graphic design studio in New York City creating publications for worldwide markets, attuned to cultural nuances. In 2002 she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art in Film from Columbia University. Her last film, “Man On Wire”, on which she was the Unit Production Manager, won an Oscar in 2009. Over the years she has won numerous awards.

This exhibition is exhibited courtesy of Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in New York City.