The Griffin Museum of Photography celebrates the opening of its new gallery at the Stoneham Theatre in Stoneham, MA, with an exhibit of the work of Fran Forman.

The exhibit, Alchemy of Memory, runs July 23 through August 30 in the Griffin Museum ’s Atelier Gallery at the Stoneham Theatre. A reception with the artist is August 16, 4:30-6 p.m.

“We are very excited about our new collaboration with the Stoneham Theatre,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Together our two organizations provide the public with a very strong offering of imagery coupled with performance.

“It is so fitting that we open our new venture with Alchemy of Memory as Fran Forman’s digital montages blend a dash of certainty with a pinch of whimsy.”

With a background in psychology, design and photography, Forman creates photographic images that combine portraiture, dreamed landscapes, and the natural world.

“My work creates juxtapositions in time,’’ says Forman. “It also re-imagines relationships of scale and physical possibility. Although my images violate the laws of physics, they honor the interdependence and connections of humanity with the animals, insects, and plants which populate the natural world.’’

Forman’s collaged images often begin with tintype portraits of ordinary mid-19th century Americans, on which she “paints,’’ reviving the fashion of that time. She replaces the original studio backdrops with her own invented photographic reality.

“I hope to suggest the connection of humble portraiture to contemporary technology, children to the cosmos, humanity to the natural world, and the spiritual to the physical,” says Forman.

Forman has a MFA in photography and design and has held a succession of positions in the fields of illustration and design. Between her professional life and raising two daughters, she continued to create her personal art, combining her skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, the non-human world, and dislocations of time and space.

Forman is a visiting scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and also teaches workshops in digital montage. Her work has been exhibited and published widely and she has won many awards and prizes.