Las Sombras/The Shadow

“I picked the dead coyote up off the road. It had been hit by a car, probably at dawn that morning. It was surprisingly heavy, but its coat was finer and softer than I had imagined. I was worried it would not fit under the enlarger and that my paper wouldn’t be wide enough, and it was going to be hard work digging a hole to bury it afterwards.

In the mid 19^thcentury the daughter of a biologist, an English woman called Anna Atkins (1799-1871) began a decade-long obsession with collecting and documenting algae and seaweed.  They were the earliest form of photography, pictures made without a camera, ‘photogenic drawings’ or photograms, in which the subject is laid on light sensitized paper and exposed to light, in this case the sun, using a process known as cyanotype. She self-published this collection in a series of volumes called ‘British Algae’.  They were beautiful, otherworldly images of white amorphous shapes floating on a deep blue background. She labeled them in neat Victorian handwriting with their classifying genus and species.

When I first put a eucalyptus leaf on a piece of photographic paper in the dark, in an art school in Australia roughly 130 years later, my fate was sealed – my own obsessions set in motion.  The natural world is full of wondrous things to look at and to chronicle and catalogue. In my own way, I have devoted myself to that end.

After I laid the coyote on the photographic paper and gently stroked the dirt and pebbles off its glossy coat and arranged its tail, I thought about Anna arranging her seaweed with the same care and with the same anticipation.

These images are the ghostly shadows of the remains of living creatures, burned onto photographic paper with light and with love, to make a lasting impression.”

– Kate Breakey

Kate Breakey is internationally known for her large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers and animals in an ongoing series called Small Deaths published in 2001 by University of Texas Press with a foreword by noted art critic, A. D. Coleman.  Since 1980 her work has appeared in more than100 one-person exhibitions and in over 60 group exhibitions in the US, France, Japan, Australia, China, and New Zealand. Her work is held in many public institutions including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the Austin Museum of Art, and the Australian National Gallery in Canberra.   Her third book, Painted Light, published by the University of Texas in 2010, is a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making.

Her collection of photograms, entitled ‘Las Sombras / The shadows’ was published by University of Texas Press in October 2012.   This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is ‘brimming with fantastic mysterious and  beautiful things.

A native of South Australia, Kate moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. She completed a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Texas in 1991 where she also taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History until 1997.  In1999, she moved to Tucson, Arizona. In 2004 she received the Photographer of the Year award from the Houston Center for Photography. She now regularly teaches at the Santa Fe Photographic workshops, and The Italy ‘Spirit into Matter’ workshops.

Her landscape images – selected from a life-time of photographing all over the world – were published by Etherton Gallery in a Catalogue entitled  ‘Slow Light’. She currently works with gold-leaf to produce a modern day version of an archaic process called an Orotone, and also uses encaustic wax, a continuation of her interest in ‘blurring lines’ between media.

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The 2017 award for the John Chervinsky Emerging Scholarship has gone to photographer Rachel Fein-Smolinski

The judges, said, “We are pleased to award the 2017 John Chervinsky Scholarship to Rachel Fein-Smolinski. Rachel’s plunge into science-and-visual-expression, her experimentation with imagery and presentation in the service of her ideas, and a special energy all come through in her uniquely provocative work. While not a requirement of this award, and quite different in form, she and John share the spirit of scientific inquiry, making this all the sweeter.”

John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship awards 2017 Press Release

Fein-Smolinski submitted The Infinite Internal for consideration for the scholarship. Fein-Smolinski says of the body of work:

“The Infinite Internal has three chapters: “The Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones”, “A Science of Desirable/Detestable Bodies”, and “The Prosthetic Practice for the Healing of Imaginary Wounds” that integrate disparate imagery, from highly stylized documents, photographs, videos of dissections, and sourced diagrams from scientific education materials used to create spaces that probe the relationship that intellectualism has with authority, gender, sexuality, and psychology. Intellectualism has historically been a saving grace for disenfranchised cultural groups, heavily associated with people of Jewish descent and those who identify as women. As someone who is both of those things, I have been carrying out my own experiments, spending time with DIY scientists and creating installation spaces that visualize science fiction stories of DIY biology and medical procedures that appropriate the authority of the bio-medical field. I print large format images created through microscopy and coat them in resin. Resin being a substance that is used in the preservation of organisms. I use clinical lighting like x-ray viewing machines to show transparencies that I produce in the darkroom on lith-film from archival scientific educational slides, carry out at home dissections of organs and organisms, grow crystals which I document via time-lapse, use alternative printing processes that reference the history of women in science like cyanotypes referencing Anna Atkins botany prints and black and white documentation of physical principles appropriated from an archive of scientific educational slides, referencing Berenice Abbot’ s work producing images for MIT’s Physics department. A vital aspect of this work is the installations, which address the images as objects themselves, amongst a world of objects that hold visual pleasure on the same level as intellectual rigor, using institutional, experimental, educational, and commercial display methods.”

Rachel Fein-Smolinski’s Statement of Purpose:

“My work is about pleasure, neurosis, objectivity and subjectivity. It is about the visceral and visual satisfaction associated with the history of the documentation and depiction of bio- medical phenomena. I use a mixture of the visual indulgence of high commerce, the sacred and compulsive laboratory space, and the expansive mode of science fiction and its ability to appropriate the authority of knowledge to create speculative installation spaces in the visual field. I look at what the relationship between neurosis, intelligence, subjectivity, objectivity and visual indulgence is within the history of the pursuit of knowledge.

The history of science has held fast to the aesthetic of objective authority, with observation as the primary source of knowledge in scientific inquiry. I scrutinize the bio-medical and techno-scientific gaze, using its authority to create discreet objects, incorporating photography, video and sculpture to search for the neurotic impetus within the fields of intellectual pursuit.

I use an alter-ego, a caricature of a neurotic, intellectual hero, constructed from cultural signifiers, as a Jewish woman, raised with a cultural identity that idealizes intellect to the point of fetishization. This is a stylized performance of a masculine archetype (yes, I am exploring what it means to be a woman through the usage of masculinity and its historical relationship to authority) used in science fiction, tv doctor dramas, and retellings of the histories of technological advancement. Intellectual inquiry is a socially acceptable form of obsessive, and scopophilic (visually indulgent) behavior. It is a space where unhealthy impulses are sublimated into the field of intellectual pursuit. All is forgiven if the hero’s brilliance outshines their character flaws.

Bio-medical exploration is a fantasy of constant visibility. To see is to know, and to know is to succeed. With techniques like dissections, bodies are eviscerated so that the spectator can incorporate the sight of the others’ internal organs into their own body of knowledge. Or microscopy, where an imaging apparatus is used to augment the viewer’s vision in order to look at, and infer new knowledge from, otherwise invisible mechanisms, ideally infinitely. However, as there is no such thing as a purely objective gaze—observation is always tied to a host of psychological associations. To see is to concurrently project and consume. Through this play-acting of biological experiments and procedures, I tease out the role of visual pleasure in intellectual inquiry, resulting in installation spaces that reproduce the clinical, experimental, and educational. In this way, I explore what Foucault described in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, as “…that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known.” ”