Alyssa Minahan
February 15 – April 18, 2021
From the Photographer – Alyssa Minahan
NOTES is a visual poem on the impermanence of our lived experiences and the beauty to be found in its acceptance. When I began making this work, I had suffered a profound personal and physical loss. At the same time, I was seeking ways to describe the liminal period in my sons’ lives between boyhood and adolescence, specifically their emotional and physical independence from me as their mother. To give form and meaning to these experiences, I turned to the materiality of the photographic medium, creating objects that question established notions of process and permanence.
The objects in NOTES – emulsion lifts, unfixed and partially fixed photograms, gelatin silver prints, film and chemigrams – continually shift and change, sometimes deteriorating into nothing while other times evolving into something more beautiful. Multiples of the same image – a cloud, inverted as both its positive and negative – reflect notions of chance and potentiality. A fingerprint left on the emulsion of an unfixed chemigram acts as a witness to human presence. These unique photographic objects, with their imperfections and variability, are evidence of the only constant – change.
Book photographs courtesy of Datz Press.
2019
18 x 25 cm
46 pages
Soft cover / Pamphlet stitch
Limited Edition of 100 copies. Each copy includes a unique photographic object.
Published by Datz Press (Seoul, South Korea).
BIO
Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials, including unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives, in non-traditional ways to express ideas integral to the medium of photography, specifically its complex relationship to time, space and memory. In September 2019, Alyssa released NOTES, a handmade photo book published by Datz Press (Seoul, South Korea). NOTES is held in the collections of The New York Public Library, International Center for Photography Library, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Research Library, Stanford University Library, California College of the Arts Library and Massachusetts College of Art and Design Morton R. Godine Library. Alyssa has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona), Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, Washington) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, Massachusetts). In addition, her work has been featured in Harper’s Magazine, Art New England and Phases Magazine. Alyssa is the recipient of the 2017 Massachusetts College of Art and Design Graduate Teaching Fellowship and is currently a Lecturer of Photography in the the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, Boston.
