Alejandro Durán, Washed Up
Washed Up Artist Statement
Alejandro Durán
Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international garbage washing ashore on Mexico’s Caribbean coast into aesthetic, yet disquieting, works. During the course of this project I have identified plastic waste from fifty nations on six continents, all found along a single stretch of coastline in Sian Ka’an, Mexico’s largest federally-protected reserve. I collect this international debris, arrange it by color and form and use it to create site-specific installations. Conflating the hand of man and nature, at times I distribute the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic takes on the shape of algae, roots, rivers, or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment. Beyond creating a surreal or fantastical landscape, these installations mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament. The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our disposable culture. Although inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, Washed Up speaks to the environmental concerns of our time and its vast quantity of discarded materials. The alchemy of Washed Up lies not only in transforming a trashed landscape, but in the project’s potential to raise awareness and change our relationship to consumption and waste. As part of my work, I am also currently creating a Museum of Garbage on location in Sian Ka’an, which will include installations and photographs from the Washed Up series. It will be accompanied by an arts and education program for the children of Punta Allen, the local community in Mexico where I have spent the past 5 years working on this project. We will explore the issue through upcycling lessons, plastic pollution research, a beach clean and other interactive activities. Activism through art and education is an integral part of the Washed Up project and is my way to raise awareness regarding this global Scourge.
Alejandro Durán – Biography
Alejandro Durán was born in Mexico City in 1974 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a multimedia artist working in photography, installation, and video. His work examines the fraught intersections of man and nature, particularly the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one. He received an MA in Teaching from Tufts University in 1999 and an MFA in poetry from the New School for Social Research in 2001. Durán received En Foco’s New Works Award and was included in the Bronx Bienial of Latin American Art in 2012. He has exhibited his work at the Galería Octavio Paz at the Mexican consulate in New York and he is currently Hunter College’s Artist-in-Residence for 2014-15. His solo show, Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape, was exhibited at Hunter’s East Harlem Art Gallery in 2015. Publications include Land Art, published in France in 2013, which also includes Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Olafur Eliasson, and Marina Abramovic, among others. Art & Ecology Now was published by Thames & Hudson in 2014 and will include images
from Washed Up, as will Unexpected Art, a publication by Chronicle Books published in 2015. Notable press includes a photo essay published in Germany’s Die Zeit, as well as a feature article in New York’s El Diario/La Prensa and mentions in New York Daily News and The New York Times. Durán has taught youth and adult classes in photography and video since 2002 and has worked as a museum educator at The Museum of Modern Art and The International Center of Photography. He is also a video producer whose clients include MoMA, The Museum of Arts & Design, and Columbia University.
Jerry Takigawa, False Food
Photographer and designer Jerry Takigawa has been a social and environmental advocate since 1969. In his series False Food, Takigawa speaks to the issue of plastics pollution specifically of the Albatross of the Midway Atoll who mistake plastic debris for food and literally starve to death.
Takigawa’s series, False Food, is featured in the Main Gallery at the Griffin Museum April 9 through June 5, 2015. An opening reception with the artist takes place on April 9, 7-8:30 p.m. Jerry Takigawa will give a gallery talk and tour of False Food at 6:00 PM. The talk is FREE.
“[False Food] is a way of taking an overwhelming environmental problem and finding a way to make it personal,” says Takigawa. “I have become acutely aware of the abundance of plastic in my life and in my world. The albatross have provided me with a new awareness of the web of life.”
Takigawa continues, “Creating these images helps me to integrate the tragedy of the [Albatross] with a sense of hope—hope that by telling and re-telling the story—observers may be inspired to act, not to turn away.”
“Jerry Takigawa doesn’t hit us over the head with preachy dialogue on the perils of plastics pollution in the artworks of False Food. Rather, he connects us with the issue more subtly,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Through their quiet cadence, Takigawa’s photographs provoke further enquiry into the context of the source materials used. What a paradox it is to discover that such beauty points to the devastation of our oceans caused by industrial civilization,” says Tognarelli. “The photographs of False Food communicate a sense of preciousness as art objects, as well as articulating the dearness of our natural resources.”
Takigawa received a BFA, with an emphasis in painting, from San Francisco State University in 1967. He studied photography under Don Worth. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, he utilized his art and design skills to help develop a pilot VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to America) in Oakland, California. In 1982, he became the first photographer to receive the Imogen Cunningham Award for color photography. Takigawa has served as past-president of People in Communications Arts (PiCA), a trustee for the Monterey Museum of Art, and currently serves as president for the Center for Photographic Art.
Takigawa’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Monterey Museum of Art, The San Francisco Foundation, the University of Louisville, Syntex Laboratories Inc., The Monterey Vineyard, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the Imogen Cunningham Trust, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
In honor of Earth Day on April 22, 2015 the museum will be open to the public for FREE all day.
David Welch, Material World
David Welch constructs totems of waste and the accumulations of materials in our contemporary consumer world. The photographs of these monuments “aim to encourage debate about consumption and the ways in which we feel compelled to consume.”
Welch’s series, Material World, is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography April 9th through June 5th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on April 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Jerry Takigawa will lead an artist talk and gallery tour of the Main Gallery exhibition False Food at 6:00pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. The Griffin Museum will be free to all visitors on April 22nd, 2015 in celebration of Earth Day.
“Material World is my response to our contemporary consumer milieu. By treating artifacts of consumer culture as Duchampian-inspired Assisted Readymades, I photograph assemblages, constructed by my own hand to form monuments and totems that serve as precarious externalizations of culture and social biography,” states Welch.
“These photographs of the totems act as symbolic mirrors and points of reflection for my own, as well as society’s, contemplative and critical gaze.”
David Welch is a fine art and editorial photographer based on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. His fine art photography explores social issues, using large-format photography steeped in conceptual influences from art history and economic theory. His project “Material World” has been widely published and exhibited both nationally and abroad.
David was named one of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward winners for 2012 and in 2011 he was selected as one of Photolucida’s Critical Mass top 50 photographers. David is a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he earned his MFA in photography. He lives on the island with his wife and children.
Robert Rindler, Jetsam Jellyfish
Robert Rindler manufactures sculptures from remains and detritus found in the Outer Cape’s transfer stations. He collects, cleans and assembles the objects he finds into categories based on color, shape and use so viewers have the opportunity to experience and reconsider the objects in a new context. As an installation artist who works within different mediums such as sculpture, photography, printmaker, designer, collector, and educator, Rindler demonstrates these skills with a playful installation of Jetsam Jellyfish.
Rindler’s Jetsam Jellyfish, is featured in the Main Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography April 9th through June 5th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on April 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Jerry Takigawa will lead an artist talk and gallery tour of the Main Gallery exhibition False Food at 6:00pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. The Griffin Museum will be free to all visitors on April 22nd, 2015 in celebration of Earth Day.
With a distinct eye for color, his jellyfish creations aim to ignite dialog “between chaos and order, beauty and danger, humor and gravity, idea and action and color and form,” states Rindler, “I am consistently intrigued by the man-made detritus our society designs and manufactures and is then discarded to live on in our environment forever.”
A graduate of Cooper Union and the Yale School of Architecture, Rindler has had a long and prominent career as an artist, curator and art educator, having served as president of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, Associate Provost of The Rhode Island School of Design, Dean of Students at the Boston Architectural Center, and Art Department Chairman at the University of Vermont. He is now a full-time resident of Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Jeremy Underwood Human Debris
Jeremy Underwood’s photographs are a commentary on what humans leave in the natural landscape. The work aims to challenge viewers to “reflect upon our consumer culture, the relationship we have with our environment and the pervasion of pollution.”
Underwood’s series, Human Debris, is featured in the Griffin Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography April 9th through June 5th, 2015. An opening reception will take place on April 9th, 2015 from 7-8:30pm. Jerry Takigawa will lead an artist talk and gallery tour of the Main Gallery exhibition False Food at 6:00pm before the reception. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. The Griffin Museum will be free to all visitors on April 22nd, 2015 in celebration of Earth Day.
“The project spotlights the environmental condition of Houston’s waterways through the building of site-specific sculptures assembled out of harvested debris collected from the beach,” says Underwood, “Each found material lends itself to a new creation, encompassing the former life of the debris into each sculpture. These objects are simply artifacts to support the work, photographed in interaction with the landscape, then left to be discovered.”
By creating photographs of his sculptures, he invites the community to interact with this project on multiple levels. The pieces he creates continue on as public art within the environment that the debris was found; the conversation about consumer culture and waste then continues in the context of a gallery space. According to Underwood,“ My work embodies our complicated relationship with the environment and the contemporary landscape, focusing on the tension between nature and culture shaping these physical spaces.”
Jeremy received his MFA from the University of Houston and BS from the University of Central Missouri in addition to study at the University of Central Lancashire in England. Underwood has been published in Photo District News and named an emerging talent by Lens Culture magazine. He has received a number of grants and fellowships from such institutions as the Society for Photographic Education, the University of Houston and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. Recent exhibitions include the Houston Center for Photography, Fotofest and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and has been awarded residency at Yaddo. His recent research project entails collaboration with the Colorado Art Ranch, Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, and the US Fish and Wildlife, exploring wilderness stewardship along Massachusetts’s marine and coastal region.
Jay Gould: Escape Velocity
Jay Gould’s work integrates scientific topics into installation and constructed photographic projects. With “Escape Velocity” Gould has been photographing the tight-knit community of model rocketry enthusiasts. “Drive a good hour outside of nearly every American metropolitan area on a sunny Saturday morning and you may see small chutes of smoke lingering in the sky,” says Jay Gould. “If you are like me, you have even curiously traced these trails from time to time.”
A series of Gould’s photographs called “Escape Velocity,” is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging, 9 Brighton St., Belmont, MA, on March 26, 2015 through June 5, 2015. A closing reception will take place June 4, 2015 from 6-8 p.m.
“Many of these explorers are taking their first steps into hands-on science,” says Gould. “These less experienced members are guided by an entire community, in which many members have careers in aerospace.”
“Who hasn’t dreamed of conquering new frontiers,” says Paula Tognarelli executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “It’s the desire to fly and the drive to know what lies beyond that spurs on these rocket explorers. Without curiosity many of us would still be huddled in a European township wondering of what cheese the moon was made.”
Jay Gould is an artist and a member of the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Gould received his BFA in photography from the University of Wisconsin and his MFA from the Savanna College of Art and Design. His work has won numerous national awards, such as the Berenice Abbott Prize for an emerging photographer, the Jeannie Pierce Award, and First Place at the Newspace Center for Photography’s International Juried Exhibition. _Gould’s work is widely exhibited around the country making solo and group show appearances at the Fridman Gallery in NYC, the University of Notre Dame, The Julia Dean Gallery in Los Angeles, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, he Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Gould is also a longtime member of the faculty at the Maine Media Workshops and is currently serving as the Chair of the Society for Photographic Education’s Mid Atlantic Region.
The exhibit is open to the public Mondays through Fridays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Susan Goldstein, Bending Time: Antique Photo Collage
Susan Goldstein has been creating hand assembled collages from vintage photographs, ephemera and discarded objects and printed matter found in flea markets, garage sales and antique stores around the country. For the artist finding the elements to construct these one-of-a-kind art objects is like excavating on an archeological dig.
Susan Goldstein’s Bending Time: Antique Photo Collage will be featured in the Griffin Museum’s Atelier Gallery at the Stoneham Theatre in Stoneham, MA, April 2 – May 31, 2015. It runs parallel to the theater’s productions of “Neville’s Island” and “How to Succeed in Business.”
A reception is May 7, 2015 at 6:30-8:00 p.m.
“The only requirement I have imposed on myself when finding elements to incorporate into my artwork is that each collage includes some element that is a photograph, negative, or other material related to making an image using a camera and film,” says Goldstein.
“I always credit the photographer when known as well as identify the subject used in the artwork if a name or location has been noted on the print,” says Goldstein. “Sometimes a print is signed by the photographer or a portrait is identified by name, but more often than not I am working with nothing more than an anonymous visual record.”
“In Bending Time: Antique Photo Collage, Susan Goldstein assembles images that hint at the absurd, add a touch of surprise for the viewer, and express her wry sense of humor and wit,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director and curator for the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Each unique art piece evolves from an explorative creative journey.”
Originally from Indianapolis, Indiana where she was born, Susan Goldstein graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder CO in 1976. After graduate study in Photography, Goldstein has had a varied photographic career. She has worked at newspapers doing freelance editorial work as well as photographing historic architectural sites. All the while in her career Goldstein found time to pursue her fine art personal projects.
Her work is collected in institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Modern Art, Joaquim Paiva Collection, Rio De Janiero, Brazil S.A. She has exhibited widely in Denver, CO where she resides.
Photography Atelier 21
Photography Atelier 21 will present an exhibit of student artwork from March 5 through March 29, 2015 at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, Massachusetts, 01890. Photography Atelier is a course for intermediate and advanced photographers offered by the Griffin Museum of Photography and taught by Meg Birnbaum and course assistant, Amy Rindskopf.
On Thursday, March 5, the public is invited to view the artwork and meet the artists at a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Photography Atelier 21 members include:
Emily Belz: Memory Lines, photographic sequences connecting space, time and memory; Richard Cohen: Ambiguity of Cityspace, restructured images of urban windows shot in downtown Boston; Jennifer Coplon: Discovering Blackstone Square, a Boston South End park; Vicki Diez-Canseco: Shape Shift: A Part of the Whole; Estelle Disch: Phototransformations; David Feigenbaum: The Shadow Knows; Nancy Fulton: Woodland Light; Trelawney Goodell: A Celebration of Norway; Law Hamilton: Atlantic Waves: Grace and Movement; James Hunt: Spirituality and a Sense of Place: The Quabbin Wilderness; Lee Kilpatrick: A Case of You, a portrait of his sister’s last years before her death; Bonnie McCormick: Too Much Rum, pinhole multiple exposure images of the Caribbean; Vicki McKenna: A Sheaf of Stories, a selection of portraits from Italy; Judith Monteferrante: Glass: Realism to Abstraction; Skip Montello: Reflections of a Quarry Wall; Amy Rindskopf: Edible Geometry, a celebration of the growing season; Andrea Rosenthal: Fleeting Glimpses; Tiziana Rozzo: The Childhood of a Family; Dianne Schaefer: The Light You Cannot See, explorations in infrared photography; Elliot Schildkrout: Lost Memories, the abandoned Lincoln Amusement Park of Dartmouth, Mass; Ellen Slotnick, Quondam; Christy Stadelmaier: Arches; Joe Staska: Unsleeping, images from sleepless nights and 36-hour days; Maria Verrier: A True Self; Carol Van Loon: Barns, a journey back to the landscape of her youth after the death of her mother; Nadine Wallack: Shadows and Silhouettes: Nothing is Explained; Catherine Wilcox-Titus: Returned to Life, a series of still-life photographs.
About the class:
Photography Atelier, in its twentieth year, is a unique portfolio-making course for emerging to advanced photographers. In addition to guidance and support in the creation of a body of work, the class prepares artists to market, exhibit and present their work to industry professionals.
Each participant in the Atelier presents a final project in the form of a print portfolio, a photographic book or album, a slide show, or a mixed media presentation. In every Atelier students hang a gallery exhibition and produce work for their own pages on the Atelier website. To see the photography of present and past Atelier students and teachers, please visit:www.photographyatelier.org. Spring 2015 Instructor Meg Birnbaum, will be happy to discuss the Photography Atelier at the reception on March 5th with anyone interested in joining the class.
Sky at Lafayette
Curators’ Statement
Since ancient times Man has been mesmerized by the sky. It has inspired us. We’ve written poems and sung about it, and danced by it. Before understanding, we prayed to it and
feared it. Life and tragedy spring from it. We measure our goals against it (sky high) and solve problems because of it (blue skying). The possibilities in life are endless because of it (the sky’s the limit). We have written in it, and rocketed through it, and fallen from it. And alas we have tainted it. The sky can be seen from above and below and it is immense beyond our understanding. We can tell time and find our way by it. It has been described as changing, mocking, moody, vanilla and tangerine. The sky though is
not what it seems to be.
The artists of SKY responded with a wide artistic interpretation of the topic giving way to abstract, representational or conceptual interpretations of “Sky” in all forms of light based media.
Thank you to the artists of SKY. The Griffin Museum of Photography is very proud to be able to share the work of these 41 photographers through this exhibition. What ever happens in life for you, do not ever give up looking upwards.
My thanks go to Daniel Miller of the Duncan Miller Gallery in Santa Monica, California whose vision allowed my dream exhibition to be realized.
The photographers in this show include: Lisa Allen, Janine Autolitano, Karl Baden, Sheri Lynn Behr, Charlie Bidwell, Meg Birnbaum, Amanda Boe, Jeff Boxer, Manuel Cosentino, Lorraine Devon Wilke, Barbara Dorin Hayden, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Lika Fedorenko, Joan Fitzsimmons, Brittonie Fletcher, Jennifer Georgescu, Najib Joe Hakim, Leslie Hall Brown, Alice Hargrave, Carol Isaak, Alyssa Minahan, Susan Keiser, John E. Kelly, Frank Kosempa, Molly Lamb, Susan Lapides, Scott Lerman, Tom Lowe, Jim McKinniss, Yvette Meltzer, Blue Mitchell, Eleanor Owen Kerr, Diane Pirie Cockerill, Anastasia Samoylova, Lynn Saville, Jennifer Schlesinger, Garret Suhrie, Larry Torno, Peter Trieber, Susan Wilson, and Dianne Yudelson
Our thanks to Lafayette City Center and the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District for their support of the Griffin Museum in bringing this exhibit to the public.
