June 1 – July 27, 2025
Featuring works by Teri Figliuzzi, Evy Huppert, Emily Laux, Leslie Gleim, Laila Nahar, Shelagh Howard, Donna Tramontozzi, Marsha Wilcox, Mandi Ballard and Kym Ghee
Curated by Aline Smithson
This exhibition brings together a group of female photographers who delve into the layered terrain of existence—traversing the visible and invisible, the personal and the cosmic. Their work maps the contours of human presence across time and space: from ancient galaxies to the mountains of Chile and volcanoes in Hawaii; from landscapes etched with memory and transformation to intimate encounters with the human body and self-expression.
The Topography of Being Human draws inspiration from the concept of topography—the detailed mapping of a surface—reimagined here as a metaphor for the human condition. The artists in this exhibition excavate these contours, revealing the emotional, cultural, environmental, and philosophical dimensions that shape who we are.
Their images explore the interconnections between self and other, memory and place, species and system. They examine how environments reflect our histories and how human actions reshape the world around us—from the spread of invasive species to the quiet transformations of a walk in the park.
This exhibition is a celebration of perception and presence—a meditation on our moment in time, our place on Earth and in the heavens, and the feminine perspective on the layered experiences of being human.
Teri Figulizzi – North Woods is a remote sanctuary within Central Park, where the relentless energy of New York City softens into stillness. In the hush following a snowfall, the scene transforms—ephemeral, pristine, and profoundly moving. Through captured images interwoven with metallic threads and delicate papers, I seek to preserve that luminous calm and the serene essence of winter. My work is a tribute to nature’s subtle strength and the fragile, enduring beauty that often goes unnoticed.
Marsha Wilcox – Ancient Light
Vincent van Gogh said, “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” I have loved looking at the night sky all my life. In this time of relentless news-cycles, political unrest and social turmoil, the majesty of the universe reminds me that although we are insignificant and transient, we are connected to something infinitely larger and timeless.
Donna Tramontozzi – DEEP TIME
Climate change is real, but it won’t destroy the Earth. It will change the Earth, but the Earth will endure as it has endured comets, asteroids, mass extinctions and tectonic shifts. This belief gives me comfort when I feel my boundaries disappear and I become a part of a vast and changing universe.
Emily Laux – HOME INVASIONS is a speculative narrative about botanical biodiversity. In Home Invasions, I imagine a world in which humans have succumbed completely to “plant blindness,” a British botanical term that refers to the human tendency to ignore plants. At the heart of my creative process is the staging of temporary installations of invasive plants in rooms where the human residents coexist with plant life, either unaware or only vaguely conscious of the intrusion of vines, branches, berries and leaves.
Evy Huppert – Atlas of Remembered Dreams explores rediscovering fifty-year-old memories hidden in overexposed, weather-damaged 35 mm black and white film rolls holding images from a 10,000- kilometer nine month backpacking road/rail/ferry trip from Ireland to India on $5/day. Unable afterwards to print from the resulting almost opaque, disappointing negatives, I left them to curl their way into old age in an old family trunk for decades. Then, entering old age myself and becoming the family archivist, I realized a digital film scanner and digital editing tools might open these analog images. One by one, a hundred scans of curly negatives slowly became a hundred windows to the past. Memories of each place and event I had recorded on the long eastward road surfaced like remembered dreams, gritty and foggy, often filmed through the dirty windows of trains, busses, and ferries. The project is ongoing.
Shelagh Howard – The Secret Keepers were created through seven stages of editing, printing, reworking and reprinting: an intentionally arduous process mirrors the average of seven attempts it takes to permanently leave an abusive partner.
Combining digital long exposures, tintypes and sliver prints, this project guides us into discussion about intimate partner abuse, including psychological abuse and coercive control, moving this epidemic out of the shadows and into the light.
These images embody not only what is difficult to put into words, but also what it’s not safe for me to say. Holding secrets in their silent embrace, they reveal only what we are brave enough to see, containing answers to questions that we must find the courage to start asking.
Laila Nahar – Lost Space Living in Our Mind is about living in a place and the experience while revealing the place as both a subject and a collaborator. The photographs emerged when the novelty, particularity and excitement faded away. It was born from the feelings that seeped in the depths of our soul, into our existence. When acceptance and contradictions of the moment lost its grip on us. It is the sudden deep breath that pauses everything and the moment spreads through our existence. Just the hopping of a little bird, the sudden darkening of the sky in anticipation of monsoon rain, or the woman on the roof taking a moment of pause to look at the sky after hanging the washed clothes. Suddenly we are freed from the moment; something rises like the swelling tide. It became a book when feelings and remembrance become the reflection of each other.
Kym Ghee – Unsilenced is a documentation of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, using multiple segments of images to expand the storytelling. This decaying institution, located in the midst of wild Appalachian Mountains, is a site where beauty and tragedy coexisted for the people who were committed to the institution, particularly women. Walking through the grounds, there is a strong but silent presence of the women who were too often committed not for madness, but for annoying their husbands, resisting the roles society prescribed to them, defying the expectations of their time. Labeled as insane, many were never released, living out their lives and dying within the asylum’s walls, forgotten and unheard.
Mandi Ballard – Shift
Through:
creation of images and objects, I am on a journey to express the intangible.
Following a pathway alone, exploring the Mystery.
The struggle is me.
Leslie Gleim – Life of the Land is an ongoing body of work from Hawai‘i Island that tells the story of Earth’s evolution through a bird’s-eye perspective, photographed from a helicopter. It unfolds as a creation story — showcasing the land’s fiery birth, transformation, and rebirth. It speaks of the land’s beginnings, transformation, adaptation, and resilience — where past and present converge to raise questions about the future. This landscape becomes a microcosm, reflecting the natural and human forces shaping the fate of our planet.
