Lafayette City Center Passageway

How does X mark a spot? How do we navigate our own surroundings? At what point do we walk, run or fall? Vantage Point seeks to illuminate our vision and create a point of contact to the land. This collection of images brings us together with a view of not just data points on a map, but locations of meaning, of remembrance, of identity.

Miriam Webster defines a vantage point as a position or standpoint from which something is viewed or considered especially a point of view. These sixty artists bring us sixty unique points of view.

Artists featured in alphabetical order –

Silvana Agostoni, Eliot Allen, Laurel Anderson, Susan Annable, Jan Arrigo, Julia Arstorp, Peter Balentine, Robin Boger, Rachel Boillot, Adele Quartley Brown, Linda Bryan, Ron Butler, Cynthia Clark, Jeff Corwin, Alexa Cushing, Angela Douglas Ramsey, Sean Du, Dena Eber, Dean Forbes, Erik Gehring, Paul Gilmore, Carole Glauber, Bob Greene, Diana Gubbay, Maureen Haldeman, Charles Haynes, John Heymann, Bill Hickey, Sandy Hill, Al Hiltz, Mark Indig, Matthew Kamholtz, Robbie Kaye, Cindy Konits, Teresa Kruszewski, Jaimie Ladysh, Catherine LeComte, Susan Lirakis, Joan Lobis Brown, Joni Lohr, Bruce Magnuson, Margaret McCarthy, Natalie McGuire, Howard Meister, Olga Merrill, Janet Milhomme, Doris Mitsch, Judith Montminy, Yuxiao Mu, Hank Paper, Wandy Pascoal, Ric Pontes, John Rich, Lydia Rogers, Katya Rosenzweig, Leann Shamash, Rakesh Sikder, Joshua Tann, Robin Venturelli, Dan Weingrod, Marjorie Wolfe and Holly Worthington

Everyday, we engage with color. We immerse ourselves in moments and memories that are shaped by color. Everyday, we react to color in ways great and small– and we don’t just react to images with color, but to color itself. Color shapes our emotions. It floods our recollections. It can be both the stimulus and the response.

Color Theory is our reaction to this moment in which we are coming out of darkness, winter to spring, in which we collectively navigate from pandemic to endemic. This moment where we try to bring life and balance back to our souls.

The artists included in Color Theory are featured artists Deborah Bay and Jay Tyrrell, with images from Vicente Cayuela, Cheryl Clegg, Donna Dangott, Yorgos Efthmiadis, Carol Eisenberg, Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband, Maureen Haldeman, Linda Haas, Leslie Jean Bart, Marcy Juran, Deborah Kaplan, Marky Kauffmann, Ann Leamon, Sheri Lynn Behr, Bruce Magnuson, Ralph Mercer, Olga Merrill, Sue Michlovitz, Julie Mihaly, Judith Montminy, Lisa Mossel Vietze, Maureen Mulhern White, Randy Otto, Lori Pond, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Lisa Ryan, Geralyn Shukwit, Vicky Stromee, Sean Sullivan, Neelakantan Sunder, Stefanie Timmermann, Donna Tramontozzi, Suzanne Williamson, Jenn Wood and Dianne Yudelson.

For more information about the photographs of Color Theory, or to see pricing download our Price and Edition Information.

The Griffin @ Lafayette City Center Passageway is located at 2 Ave de Lafayette in Downtown Crossing, Boston. The passageway connects Macy’s, the Lafayette Tower offices and the Hyatt Regency, Boston.

The Exhibitors for Once Upon a Time: Photographs That Inspire Tall Tales are:
Mary Aiu, Jan Arrigo, Joan Barker, Carson Barnes, Andrea Birnbaum, Meg Birnbaum, Lora Brody, Sally Chapman, Diana Cheren Nygren, Jaina Cipriano, Cheryl Clegg, Ashley Craig, L. Aviva Diamond, Suzette Dushi, Steven Edson, Diane Fenster, Kev Filmore, Alexa Frangos, William Franson, Carole Glauber, Nadide Goksun, Elizabeth Greenberg, Marsha Guggenheim, Sarah Hadley, Maureen Haldeman, Julie Hamel, Joan Haseltine, Sandy Hill, Mark Indig, Carol Isaak, Leslie Jean-Bart, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Marcy Juran, Asia Kepka, Karen Klinedinst, Anne Kornfeld, Teresa Kruszewksi, Anna Litvak-Hinenzon, Marcia Lloyd, Joni Lohr, Bruce Magnuson, George McClintock, Yvette Meltzer, Ralph Mercer, Judith Montminy, Charlotte Niel, Steven Parisi-Gentile, Ave Pildas, Russ Rowland, Ellen Royalty, Lisa Ryan, Nathalie Seaver, Sarah Silks, Felice Simon, Elin O’Hara Slavick, Zachary Stephens, Vicky Stromee, Stefanie Timmermann, Leanne Trivett, Vicki Whicker, Suzanne Williamson, Dianne Yudelson, Nina Weinberg Doran, Joanne Zeis, Mike Zeis and Charlyn Zlotnik.

See review by What Will You Remember.

This exhibition in our Lafayette Gallery is to be called Once Upon a Time: Photographs That Inspire Tall Tales.

A catalog is available.

Curator’s Essay Once Upon a Time

We were looking for photographs that inspire story telling. It could be fiction. It could be fact. We were looking for photographs that are fodder for formulating a narrative.

From photographs chosen  for the Once Upon a Time: Photographs That Inspire Tall Tales exhibition for the wall at our Lafayette City Center Passageway Gallery, our audience and invitees will then be asked to visit the exhibition, and write stories inspired from a photograph in the Once Upon a Time: Photographs That Inspire Tall Tales exhibition and to submit the stories to the Griffin Museum. We will also invite area schools (all levels) and colleges to participate in the writing exercises as well as the general public.

Deadline for writing submissions is January 14, 2022 at Midnight Pacific Time. We will feed the stories to the jurors as we get them.

Where the submissions of writings will be sent is to photos at griffin museum dot org.

We will invite selected authors of stories (chosen by jurors Cassandra Goldwater and Jill Frances Johnson) to read or speak their stories in an event held on March 6th during the closing reception at Lafayette City Center.

There will be 3 cash awards of $100 chosen from photographs and 3 cash awards chosen by writing juror(s) from written narratives. The award money is from an anonymous donor.

The jurors for the writing exercises are Cassandra Goldwater and Jill Frances Johnson.

Cassandra Goldwater is a former adjunct professor at Lesley University where she taught Creative Nonfiction, freshman English and survey literature classes to undergraduates for almost 10 years. Additionally, she mentored students in the Low Residency MFA program in word image projects. Partnering with Karen Davis, she co-taught Word Image in the extension program at Lesley. She holds an MFA from Lesley University, an MBA from Simmons College, and a BA from the University of New Hampshire.

Goldwater’s commentary on the photographic work of Jennette Williams and Hellen van Meene appeared in the Women’s Review of Books. Her essay “Then What?” was published in the former online journal Perceptions.

Jill Frances Johnson is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at Solstice Literary Magazine. Jill earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA in 2017 after graduating from Smith College in the Ada Comstock Scholars Program for nontraditional (older!) students. Her work appears in Under the Gum Tree and Clockhouse and SolsticeLitMag. Her current project is a memoir Water Skiing in Kashmir about her expat life during the ‘60’s.

Jill blogs at vermontwritercooks and @jillvtbrat on Twitter and Instagram. She divides her time between the green hills of Vermont and the artsy city of St Petersburg, Fl.

Photography Atelier is a 12-session portfolio and project building course for emerging to advanced photographers offered through the Griffin Museum of Photography. Now in its 25th year, the Atelier class 34 was led by photographer Molly Lamb.

Exhibiting photographers of Photography Atelier 34 are:

Lora Brody  Sisters

My hand-made Ziatype photographic images explore relationships between sisters, opening a window into their personal narratives.

Joy Bush Places I Never Lived

While photographing the facades of houses in a sleuth-like fashion, I fantasize about who lives there and what life is like on the inside. It is about imagining my life, and who I would be, in a different place.

Marcy Cohen The Birds, the Sky and the Sea

This series is about escaping the loneliness and horror of the pandemic through an enhanced connection with the natural world. The subject matter birds, the sky and the sea are metaphors for a world beyond everyday concern and are intended to provoke positive emotions during dark times.

David Comora The Space Between is both stimulus and response – a space to
experience the world anew.

Kathy DeCarlo-Plano Quiet

Images that find the tranquility, quietness and peace that is to be found in the world.  

Miren Etcheverry My Father’s Story

This project is about my father’s story. In 1940, when he was 15 years old, he escaped German occupied France to join General de Gaulle’s Free French forces.

Eric Frere  Color at the End of the Tunnel is a series of images taken at Maverick T Station over the pandemic during the winter and spring. It captures the transition from a sense of despair to a glimmer of hope.

Cassandra Goldwater Surface Tensions

Goldwater’s project explores surfaces as boundaries.

Deborah Kaplan Syllabary for a Natural World

It has been said that if we do not have a word for something, it is unacknowledged, hard to bring into consciousness as an actual thing in the world. This series, Syllabary for a Natural World, reaches back to prehistoric expressions of mark making to explore the innate complexity and language of the natural world, to restart a process of abstraction and understanding.

Matthew Kaufman Barren Riches

My images focus on the beauty inherent in the variety of un-adorned structure of trees and the relation of trees to their surroundings.

Carole LoConte Tedesco – They Existed

This project arose out of my lifelong interest in the visual language of death, having grown up around colonial New England cemeteries and the powerful imagery carved on gravestones. I photograph them as a way of honoring those lives and remembering, even in a small way, the people who lived them.

Rebecca Loy Reflections

This series uses flowers to represent our humanity and how we seek to come to terms with our reflections, both inside and out.

Maureen McKeon Passing Through is a contemplation of transition, impermanence, and remembrance as I enter the final stage of my life.

Camille Neville In ‘Musings’ I used my love of music and my own experiences as a musician to help spark creativity in my photography.

Hope Pashos – Ordered Chaos

Long exposure photography takes many moments of chaos and synthesizes them into one, singular, moment of order. Each is a series of movements captured as one frozen split second, never to be captured the same way again.

Lynne Stuart Lamson Reflecting on Water explores the rippled reflections on the water and the intricate designs within the water’s surface in an effort to be present in the moment, to gain new perspectives, and to wonder.

Aimee Towey-Landry Wandering Along the Horizon is an exploration of constructed color, light, and shadow evoking sculptural qualities and movement.

Maria A. Verrier Can’t You Hear Me

A buried voice comes alive in the making of these images, piecing together subconscious rumblings. Like a dream, the succession of images attempts to reconstruct the ideas, emotions, and sensations of a seventeen-year-old’s chaos.

Andrew Wang  Always an Outsider is a visual exploration of how the feeling of racism has become a pervasive thought in my life.

Jeanne Widmer The Longing of Silence

With this series, I am exploring some of the feelings of the pandemic: hemmed in with no end in sight, longing for family, for one on one contact with friends, for freedom from fear, and for ways I could comfort the many children and teenagers struggling and losing so much during those long days.

Photography Atelier Website

Splash implies a summer frolic at the beach but what else can you think of?  A fountain, a swath of color, a sound, a mermaid? Thirty-nine photographers weigh in on their interpretation of the topic.

Splash comes out of what we see as a universal need to rejuvenate after over a year of hardship. We wanted to celebrate the cycles of seasons as Summer follows Spring. We wanted to foster emotional healing while using the photograph as a vehicle to release anguish caused by great losses and by over a year of isolation. What better way to unleash creative juices for the artists and the viewer. There is always the connection of seeing artwork in context to past experience. We wanted joyous memories to flood the imagination.

We asked the photographers to think about the meaning of “Splash.” We  received a variety of answers many of which involve water. Hopefully we engage the audience to imagine their past and future “Splash” moments and hope that more than a “Belly Flop” comes to mind.

The photographers of Splash are: Federica Armstrong, Jan Arrigo, Gary Beeber, Meg Birnbaum, Norm Borden, Sally Bousquet, Lora Brody, Joy Bush, Richard Alan Cohen, L. Aviva Diamond, Alex Djordjevic, Steven Edson, Miren Etcheverry, Kev Filmore, Jennifer Greenburg, Maureen Halderman, Carol Isaak, Leslie Jean-Bart, Roger Carl Johanson, Susan Lapides, Susan Lirakis, Joyce P. Lopez, Bruce Magnuson, Landry Major, Carol Mathieson, Meryl Meisler, Olga Merrill, Judith Montminy, Rita Nannini, Richard O’Neill, Jaye Phillips, Ann Rosen, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Russ Rowland, Sarah Schorr, Vicky Stromee, Neelakantan Sunder, Kiyomi Yatsuhashi and Dianne Yudelson.

What Will You Remember Best Photo Picks June 21

This exhibition all started in one of my classes last August. Numerous students presented work that challenged the planes and layers of everyday living. In particular, the works by Bill Gore and Dennis Geller spurred on the shaping of this exhibition. At first look, I found their photographs confusing yet very exciting. I quickly tried to unravel the cause of my off-kilter posture, as I am not one to ever dismiss digital intervention or novel pathways.

Since I’ve known Bill Gore, he has produced work grounded in real life and often spiced with wryness and serendipity. He would vacillate between photographing open land and city scenes through to commercial retail lots; all places we inhabit. His Life could Be A Dream series was definitely a departure from his familiar and mine. Bill was recalibrating and to grasp his reasons, it was time for me to turn the dial towards “I” for “insight” as well. His artist statement I share here, was a beginning step.

“These photographic works are assemblages of images that are drawn from my everyday life.  My process uses digital imagery to deconstruct photographs into 0’s and 1’s, mix them into a digital bardo, and bring forth a new vision with abstract forms that carry the secret narratives of their ancestor images.  I am drawn to the possibilities of everyday subjects mingling in a space where the present and the past are compressed into the moment.  While the means is digital, I see the outcome as physical prints that celebrate color and form together with literal narrative.  I search for models and metaphors in ordinary subjects with which I have a long acquaintance as I explore my own fragile and aging relationship with my environment.” 

“The Land bears constant witness and reveals itself as an endless stream of images. But the conscious mind is selective, and memory illusive. ‘My Life Could Be a Dream’ series works in the realm of perception and illusion and explores our mental processes of combining new and remembered visual inputs while we create our own realities…” – Bill Gore

Dennis Geller’s path began in exploring representational subjects in his photographs.  He honed his perception in the studio and then the forest. Deeper dives into the language of photography brought him to explore the presence of light in the everyday as well as articulating the physicality of emotions in the abstract, the science of vision and the dimensions of time and change.

For many of us, over the course of the past twelve months, time has been irrelevant. Days blend. Memories shift. In “Coronaland” the interpretation and measurement of time passing seems not an exact science. Exploring Geller’s and Gore’s photographs prompted my thinking of our present-day experience in a pandemic, sheltered for safety, isolated yet stimulated by the imagination and our impressions of what is seen and felt.

But even in normal times, reality is tied to fantasy. A dream state can give way to inquiry upon waking as to whether one’s memories were fact or fiction. Reading a book or watching a movie leads to an altered mindset. The characters in any story are authentic only until the very last page, the credits roll or they are recalled from memory. At “the end” we grieve for the loss of characters we have come to know and the worlds they inhabit as if we were participants in the stories with them.

Digits: A Parallel Universe is intended as a conjectured and separate plane of reality, that co-exists with the photographer’s own here and now. Each photographer has invented her or his own fiction. There is digital intervention in every photograph in the exhibition yet the methods vary as to how the altered results are manufactured. The viewer is reminded of what it might feel like to be in a changing state, time or dimension.

There are eleven photographers in Digits: A Parallel Universe. The photographers are: Debe Arlook, Diana Cheren Nygren, Najee Dorsey, Cathy Cone, Miren Etcheverry, Dennis Geller, Bill Gore, Marcy Juran, Deborah Kaplan, Lisa Ryan and Gordon Saperia.

Debe Arlook photographs landscapes of the American West. She hoped that through her images in Forseeable Cache she could communicate the experience of how the resultant energy of meditation feels and looks. She has spent a lifetime pursuing spiritual growth.

Diana Cheren Nygren’s photographs in When the Trees are Gone, come straight from her imagination as a cautionary tale. Each of the six photographs depict city living in crisis. Told through the veil of humor and prophesy, we see high hopes that art can be an impetus for change.

Hand Painted Photographs by Cathy Cone is a blending of two worlds. First, the final imagery is pulled from the past to rise transformed in the present. The tintypes change from standalone antique portraits to objects infused by a modern breath and brush. Rather than relying just on the photographic image or just a painted artifact, Cone’s amalgam of mediums shapes her unique narrative.

Najee Dorsey digitally collages narratives of Black life in history and present day that must be retold and remembered. Two of his artworks in Digits: A Parallel Universe feature prominent African American artists; Kara Walker and Basquiat. Walker is famous for her cut paper silhouetted narratives haunted by the atrocities of slavery. Basquiat’s work has been attributed to elevating graffiti artists to the art scene. In 1982, the sale of Basquiat’s art set a record for the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist’s work.

Miren Etcheverry uses family photographs and digital assemblage to create portrait tributes to the female family members and friends who have influenced her life. She calls these digital creations her “goddesses”. The title of her compilation of all this work is called Oh My Goddess! Most of Etcheverry’s family live across the Atlantic in France but in her studio they all are a “desktop” away.

Marcy Juran blends digital processes and family photographs in Family History | Family Mystery, her altered reality where generations of her family can gather in one place.

Deborah Kaplan creates her own language from photographs she’s made in nature in Syllabary for a Natural World. These natural symbols are true digits. As Kaplan mentions in her statement, she “aims to recreate a language that never was, but which ought to be”.

Lisa Ryan’s family was constantly on the move. As a result she says she was always trying to orient herself in new environments. She uses infrared photography to show her anomalous perspective as a “stranger in a strange land”. *  Infrared light lies beyond the visible light spectrum and can’t be seen by the human eye.

Gordon Saperia looks for the grand landscapes as he travels the world. He is not shy in using digital manipulation to augment the original photograph to represent his emotional response to a scene. Sometimes it is minor color shifts or contrast moves. Other times he combines elements to shape a “brave new world.” **

Imagining has been an important pastime for me over the course of my personal life and work life. It was integral for my parents as well. They provided creative outlets in our daily lives. As an example, they made my brother and I a playroom in our home where we could create whatever we wished to spark creativity. My brother hammered nail upon nail into the wooden floor boards until it was a continuous sheet of metal nail heads. And now as an adult, he is an inventor. I chose to paint the ceilings and walls with scenes recalled from dreams or the books I read. Once out of school, I painted murals in peoples’ homes to make a very modest living.

In my youth, science fiction and fantasy were my favorite books. Arthur C. Clarke was a favorite author. His science fiction stories were great fodder for the imagination. Clarke dreamed of possibilities that came to be fifty years into his future. He saw “imagination, coupled with science, technology and the arts, care of our planet and humanity as precious and essential elements of our future survival.” ***

Carl Sagan was another favorite dreamer. He is known as an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, poet, and science communicator. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, that was the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. He is credited with saying, “Imagination will often carry us to the worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.” ****

From all these things, the germ of the idea for this exhibition was born. My gratitude to the artists for their enthusiasm and their very forward and creative thinking.

May we all now “Live Long and prosper.” *****    – PFT

Footnotes

*Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein.

** Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley.
*** From Arthur C. Clarke Foundation
****  Carl Sagan
*****A catch phrase and hand gesture made famous by Star Trek, the tv series. When two Vulcans greeted each other or said good-bye they would make a Vulcan salute by holding up a hand and moving the pointer and middle finger to form a V and they would say the phrase “Live long and prosper” at the same time.

The Photographers of Digits: A Parallel Universe:
Debe Arlook
Standing on sacred Native American land surrounded by sandstone buttes and rock formations, I felt a whoosh of indescribable energy that reverberated within me. In stillness I hovered between an alternate awareness and the presence of my surroundings. With closed eyes, the landscape left a colorful imprint on my eyelids. Foreseeable Cache began here, in the sublime beauty of the American West, where spiritually minded practices and Native American beliefs teach us that land is sacred and body, mind, spirit and heart are connected.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Diana Cheren Nygren
Surroundings play a dominant role in shaping experience. Born out of three series, this project imagines city dwellers searching for moments of relief in a world shaped by climate change, and the struggle to find a balance between an environment in crisis and manmade structures. The beach becomes rising tides, threatening the very foundation of the city. The clash of nature and city results in an absurd profusion of visual noise and little relief. The resulting images lay bare challenges to city planners, and the problematic nature of the future that lies ahead for humanity and the planet. My work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence social change. These compositions challenge the viewer to question the images. It is not reality, and not the future, but one possible future. While the images in the series When the Trees are Gone have an apocalyptic tone, they are inspired also by humor. Ultimately, this work is not pessimistic. I am hopeful that, as many urban planners and landscape architects already are, we can find new approaches to urban design.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Cathy Cone
Hand Painted Photographs
My grandmother raised me. She was born with a large birthmark in the shape of a fish that covered her chin and neck. She referred to it as her purple stain. When I was young she would often tell me the story of how it happened repeatedly throughout my childhood. She told me her mother cut her finger cleaning fish when she was pregnant with her. Her mother put her finger up to her mouth immediately to stop the bleeding and according to my grandmother, “marked her”. Her mother died as a result of my grandmother’s birth several weeks later. Had she explained it any other way I would be a very different person today. I saw it a beautiful pattern imbued with magic not an imperfection. My grandmother suffered through stares and pointing fingers often as I was holding her hand. These kinds of folk stories and explanations were part of my childhood and nurtured my imagination. They held a transformative power as a kind of magical soul medicine.

I begin by scanning tintypes that I started collecting in the late seventies. The printed photograph then becomes a contemplative ground for painting. They are independent of each other physically, historically and on many other levels. The painted photograph essentially is a duet in which two mediums may contribute towards a whole. The integrity of both exists simultaneously in a shared physicality through and on the photographic print. The composition is essentially a duet where both mediums of equal importance. I’m interested in the translation of these found tintypes by reanimating or resuscitating the portrait. I think of the portraits as time travelers while painting late night seances. With the help of technology, the scanned tintypes often lead to new clues perceptually. It provides a field for painting and mark making. Perhaps they’re tarot cards from outer space. It’s my way of re-touching history.

CV
Title Sheet

Najee Dorsey
As an artist, Najee Dorsey has developed much in his craft over the years, and has become known for his mixed media collage, digital media collaged images of little known and unsung historical figures, as well as nostalgic scenes from African American life in the southern United States. In his work, as Najee chronicles moments in Black life throughout history, he maintains that, “stories untold are stories forgotten”.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Miren Etcheverry
My Oh My Goddess! series celebrates the women who have influenced me.  Most of these women are part of my extended family, and are living full and active lives in southern France, where I am from.   A few of these women have now passed, but their memories live on.  Among these women are my mother, my grandmother, my mother-in-law and other relatives.

During the recent period of the pandemic and its associated restrictions, the distance between me, my family of origin and friends has never seemed so great.  Knowing that I am no longer just a simple airplane flight away from visiting them saddens me. 

These playful depictions of these women reflect happy moments spent with them, while I am here and they are far away.  During my period of confinement, I revisited my personal collection of photographs and transformed these ordinary women, giving them a breath of new life, and capturing their lively spirits and dynamism.  I mean to convey what is most beautiful about them, reinterpreting that beauty, even transforming them into goddesses.  

I come from a long line of strong women.  During my life, I have continued to surround myself with strong women.  They are my role models and the source of my own strength and feminist spirit. Indeed, they are my goddesses.

Bio 
Title Sheet

Dennis Geller
These images, grouped under the title Visual Pathways, encompass two themes, both motivated by the mechanics of our visual system. The images on our retinas are not like stills of a movie. A spot on the retina shows chemical activation based on all the images it has seen recently, not just the light that it is seeing “right now”; later in the brain these successive smears of chemical activation are refined to the movies that we “see.” Some of the images here tease out that effect by showing the changes in a scene as a few moments pass, letting the parts that remained the same fade into the background.  Elsewhere in the brain, the processing of color and tonality are handled by separate pathways; others of these images invite us to imagine what we would see if one of those pathways were handled differently. All the images in the group play on the difference between what we see and how we see it.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Bill Gore
The Land bears constant witness and reveals itself as an endless stream of images. But the conscious mind is selective, and memory illusive. My Life Could Be a Dream series works in the realm of perception and illusion and explores our mental processes of combining new and remembered visual inputs while we create our own realities.

These photographic works are assemblages of images that are drawn from my camera.  My processes use digital imagery to go beyond the camera and deconstruct images into 0’s and 1’s and mix them into a digital bardo where the present and the past are compressed into the moment.  While the means is digital, I see the outcome as physical prints that combine abstract elements of color and form together with literal narrative.

I am drawn to the possibilities of digital imagery as an artistic avenue into questions about the conscious mind and the formation of belief. I search for models and metaphors in ordinary subjects as I explore my own fragile and aging relationship with our uniquely American culture.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Marcy Juran

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Deborah Kaplan
Mark making. Symbols. These are some of the earliest efforts of human beings. This series, Syllabary for a Natural World, reaches back to prehistoric expressions of mark making to explore the innate complexity and language of the natural world, to restart a process of abstraction and understanding. Through photographs of everyday woodlands, by means of digital modification and mark making, I aim to recreate a language that never was, but which ought to be.

It has been said that if we do not have a word for something, it is unacknowledged, hard to bring into consciousness as an actual thing in the world.

I examine the linear forms of tree trunk and branches, of leaf and stem, as they reframe themselves into an infinite set of almost repeating, but ever-changing patterns. The physical recording of years of growth and eons of evolved complexity balanced and whole is visually palpable. And here the language arises.

May we bring the complexity and balance fully to consciousness.  May we develop a language as deep as nature itself.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Lisa Ryan
Finding My Way
My family moved around a lot.  Rarely was everyone on the same continent, much less in the same country. I was always trying to orient myself to the new environments. My sense of direction remains challenged, but I have found many diverging paths, wonderful places along the way. Infrared photography, a different wavelength of light, shows us more detail and fascinates with false color.

Bio
Title Sheet

Gordon Saperia
The Painted Pixel
I am honored to be part of the Griffin Museum of Photography group show “Digits: A Parallel Universe”. Much of what I attempt to accomplish as a photographer is consistent with the vision for this exhibition.

The grand landscape has always been my preferred subject. Mountains, sea, plains, and deserts all bring me joy and allows me to express myself through image making. Photographing landscape in low light allows for wonderful visual opportunities.

Creating unique landscape images is a challenge. Digital manipulation and significant post -processing afford me the opportunity to meet that challenge; I’m able inject some of my emotions present at the moment of capture. The result is an altered reality using techniques I like to call “pixel painting”.

The six images chosen by the curator, taken in the Atacama Desert (Chile), White Pocket (Arizona), Provincetown Dunes (Massachusetts), Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Tibetan and Bolivian Plateaus, are representative of my interpretation of the world’s natural beauty.

Bio/CV
Title Sheet

Purchase the catalog.

What Will You Remember‘s review of Digits

What Will You Remember’s Best Photo Picks June 2021

Statement
In 2020, 50 million people are living with dementia globally. In the United States, one in three seniors suffer with Alzheimer’s or dementia at the time of their death. The US government, through Medicare and Medicaid, will spend approximately $305 billion annually to care for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. There is an additional $250 billion shouldered by family members and unpaid caregivers. Six million people in the US have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. It’s estimated that only 1 in 4 people with the disease are diagnosed which means it’s possible that 24 million people in the US are living with dementia.

And yet despite the millions of individuals and families affected, dementia is often a taboo subject with limited public awareness or discourse. A diagnosis can become a mechanism for segregating those affected from society, making it easy to see only the label instead of the individual.

The typical narrative about dementia tends to focus on the clinical diagnosis or medical status of an individual, and is all too often depicted using fear, despair and vulnerability. This narrow and incomplete view of dementia quickly becomes a powerful means to distance oneself from their humanity. By focusing only on the narrowest of views, that narrative does little to change the stigma of those living with the disease. In many ways, showing the stereotypical perspectives only makes it easier to continue ignoring the burgeoning health crisis and the individuals themselves.

The goal of this [body of work] is to de-stigmatize those living with dementia. To use empathy as a means for connection and understanding. To tell a more complex and complete story of those living with the disease and its affect on their families and loved ones.

To give the audience courage to act in ways large and small, you must  show the whole story – the fear, loss and despair, but also the love, connection, dignity, and powerful humanity that always remain – in the subjects, in the care-partners, and in the families and communities. That is the only path to evolve the narrative and have a positive social change.

Bio
Trained as a journalist, Joe Wallace has been a portrait photographer and storyteller for twenty years. Like many, Joe has a deeply personal connection with dementia. His maternal grandfather and hero, Joe Jenkins, had Alzheimer’s. His maternal grandmother Elizabeth Ponder (Bebe) had vascular dementia. And in recent years, his mother Barbara has begun her journey with the disease.

Joe was frustrated by the common, one-dimensional narrative of dementia – futility, despair, and loss. These are real and important elements of the dementia journey, but by focusing only on the narrowest of views, do very little to change the stigma of those living with the disease. In many ways, showing the stereotypical perspectives only makes it easier to continue ignoring the burgeoning health crisis and the individuals themselves.

Joe feels strongly that to give the audience courage to act in ways large and small, you must to show the whole story. The artist must not be afraid to show not only the fear, loss and despair, but also the love, connection, dignity, and powerful humanity that always remain – in the subjects, in the care-partners, and in the families and communities. That is the only path to evolve the narrative and have a positive social change.

Visit Joe Wallace’s website.

Primary Sources are documents that were created by witnesses or first recorders of events. We’ve come to expect that photographs are reliable and reveal the truth about moments in time. It has been said that photographs do not lie, however we all know they can. But so can a written record. A photograph can be altered through manual and digital means. The validity of a photo can also be changed to communicate a photographer’s point of view rather than the reality of the situation. A subject in a photograph may have alternative motives for being photographed. Photographs taken for marketing purposes are meant to influence public opinion and behavior rather than truth-tell.

This exhibition was meant to depict the photograph as document or as proof to phenomena or  happenings. The photographer was meant to be seen as witness. I asked the submitters to interpret that instruction fluidly. Was I only  interested in documentary photography? That was one way to answer this call. I asked them, however, to use their imaginations to come up with answers to my query. It is your responsibility, dear viewer, to determine fact or fiction in these 67 primary source materials.

The 67 photo chroniclers are:
Mildred Alpern
David Anderson
Roger Archibald
Jan Arrigo
Anne-Laure Autin
Carson Barnes
Karen Bell
Meg Birnbaum
Edward Boches
Sally Bousquet
Valerie Burke
Joy Bush
Erin Carey
Davida Carta
Bill Chapman
Sally Chapman
Annie Claflin
Dawn Colsia
Lee Cott
Allison Dinner
Alex Djordjevic
Richard Dweck
Diane Fenster
Kev Filmore
Carole Glauber
Steven Gentile
Scott Gordon
Lauren Grabelle
Michal Greenboim
Law Hamilton
Silke Hase
Sandy Hill
Yoko Ishii
Leslie Jean-Bart
Jamie Johnson
Marcy Juran
Amy Kanka Valadarsky
Ken Kartes
Gioia Kuss
Bree Lamb
James Lattanzio
Sunjoo Lee
Susan Lirakis
Marcia Lloyd
Joni Lohr
Bruce Magnuson
Vicki Margulies
Olga Merrill
Yvette Meltzer
Judith Montminy
Ruth Nelson
Nancy Nichols
Jane Paradise
Katherine Richmond
Tony Schwartz
Sam Scoggins
Sara Silks
Zachary Stephens
Vicky Stromee
Neelakantan Sunder
Donna  Tramontozzi
Inna Valin
Dianne Yudelson
Mara Zaslove
Joanne Zeis
Mike Zeis
Charlyn Zlotnik

The idea behind this exhibition was to say that there are many ways of communicating. Some people do best with the written or spoken word. Others are visual communicators using pictures or signals to converse. We wanted a vehicle that would speak to this concept and sent out a call for entry for  an exhibition called “In Your Mother Tongue: A Word and Image Dialogue.” Our thinking was that two artists would submit as one collaborative entry. We requested two photographers or a photographer and a poet (or writer), or two poets, a poet and a writer, or two writers submit as one entry.  We only received submissions that were either by two photographers, a photographer and either a writer or poet and two photographers that each communicated with two painters. We received no submissions of an interchange between two writers.

The artist collaborations for “In Your Mother Tongue: A Word and Image Dialogue” are listed here:

Alina Marin-Bliach and Zoe Gonzalez
Edward Boches and Barbara Boches
Joy Bush and Stephen Vincent Kobasa
Richard S. Chow and Georgina Marie
Gina Costa and Yvette Meltzer
Adrienne Defendi and Angelika Schilli
Alex Djordjevic and Andrej Djordjevic
Yorgos Efthymiadis and Arlinda Shtunii
Diane Fenster and Miles Stryker
Kev Filmore and Kate Gallagher
Bill Gore and Ann Nicholson Brown
Linda Grashoff and June Goodwin
Michal Greenboim and Leslie Jean-Bart
Law Hamilton and Lauraine Alberetti Lombara
Law Hamilton and Alexanderia Eddy Casey
Silke Hase and Tristan Stull
Rohina Hoffman and David M. J. Hoffman
Evy Huppert and Angus Scott
Leslie Jean-Bart and Steven Gentile
Diane Nicholette Jeon and Nina Weinberg Doran
Marcy Juran and Ellen Hoverkamp
Karen Klinedinst and Richard Manly Heiman
David Kulik and Stephanie JT Russell
Stephen Levin and Leah Aronow-Brown
Yvette Meltzer and Gail Spilsbury
William Nourse and Lisa Goren
Jane Paradise and Rich Perry
Jaye Phillips and Denise Lynch (2 entries)
Lee Post and Tom O’Leary
Susan Rosenberg Jones and Steven Gentile
Susan Rosenberg Jones and Brahna Yassky
Karin Rosenthal and Ellen Jaffe
Tony Schwartz and Victor Schwartzman
Lisa Paulette Silberman and Erica Silberman
Vicky Stromee and Catherine Harold
Jane Szabo and Elline Lipkin
Neelakantan Sunder and Diana Sunder
JP Terlizzi and Joshua Sarinana
Stephen Tomasko and Daniel Sapp
David Underwood and Susan O’Dell Underwood
Cate Wnek and Susan DeWitt
Julie Williams-Krishnan and Yuyutsu Sharma
Jonas Yip and Wai-lim Yip
John Yrchik and Eileen Sypher
Dianne Yudelson and James Yudelson

Our rules asked that within each pairing there needed to be an idea that connected the collaboration. Each team found his/her own partner. We did not provide a limitation on theme. We chose submissions that best answered our call for entry and showed an interchange of ideas. As jurors and “readers” we saw exchanges where the topic was the unifier. We saw definite dialogue between collaborators. We saw submissions where the collaborators spoke in different “languages” per se, yet we as jurors could follow intent. Connection was truly happening. Each artist spoke in the language that felt more natural; either as word or image. In other words each spoke in their “Mother Tongue.”

We leave it up to you dear readers to decide how you communicate best. Perhaps you will discover that you have a natural affinity for all language. We hope you enjoy the challenge of this exhibition as viewer and participant.

“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes….Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”
― Arshile Gorky

The artists in the Abstraction Attraction exhibition are:

David Anderson, Jan Arrigo, Janine Autolitano, Gary Beeber,  Sheri Lynn Behr, Karen Bell, Patricia Bender, Edward Boches, Joy Bush,  Wen-Han Chang, John Chen, Richard Cohen, Benjamin Dimmitt, Alex Djordjevic, Nicholas Fedak II, Yoav Friedlander, Dennis Geller, Steve Gentile, Carole Glauber, Linda Grashoff, Elizabeth Greenberg, Aubrey Guthrie, Law Hamilton, Sandy Hill, Sue Anne Hodges, Carol Isaak, Leslie Jean-Bart, Cynthia Johnston, Amy Kanka Valadarsky, Marky Kauffmann, Robert Lanier, Stephen Levin, Joan Lobis Brown, Joni Lohr, Alina Marin-Bliach, Mahala Mazerov, Ralph Mercer, Judith Montminy, Robert Moran, Julianne Nash, Lisa Nebenzahl, Ruth Nelson, Erin Neve, Walter Oliver, Marcy Palmer, Madhugopal Rama, Katherine Richmond, Russ Rowland, Joshua Sariñana, Wendi Schneider, Tony Schwartz, Sara Silks, Leah Sobsey, Vicky Stromee, Neelakanantan Sunder, Donna Tramontozzi, David Underwood, Melanie Walker, Nicole White, Dianne Yudelson, Joanne Zeis and Mike Zeis