August 30, 2009  (Winchester, MA) With paper a rare and expensive commodity in the 19^th century, books’ endpapers were often used as note pads to practice spelling, jot down lists, and record purchases.

As a girl, Zeva Oelbaum was fascinated with the Hebrew books in her family’s basement and the scribbles and markings she found in the endpapers.

Years later, as a photographer interested in found objects, she revisited her childhood preoccupation. Manipulating imagery from her family’s books and others from the Jewish community, she created a body of work that transforms markings in several languages – Latin, Russian, German, Polish, Aramaic, and Yiddish — into a coherent visual story.

Her series of photographs, Hand to Hand, is featured in the Atelier Gallery of the Griffin Museum September 10 through November 1. An opening reception is September 16. The exhibit is courtesy of the Hirschl + Adler Modern, NY.

“These orphaned tomes connected me to a time and place far beyond my Missouri upbringing,’’ Oelbaum says of her family’s books. “I imagined how they had traveled from hand to hand for centuries, like portable identities.’’

The photographs, which are toned gelatin silver prints, are intended to give the viewer a sense of scanning over a page; some are presented as diptychs and some as triptychs.

Oelbaum’s aim is to immortalize the inherent lyricism in a word, a scribble, and an inkblot. Composed of positive and negative images, the photographs can also be viewed as metaphors for life and death.

A New York-based photographer, Oelbaum has work included in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage, National Museum of the American Indian, and the Polaroid Collection, as well as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

She graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, in 1977 with a degree in anthropology.  She teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York and is the author of two books on photography.

Courtesy of Hirschl + Adler Modern NY

Empire of Glass  illuminates John D’Agostino’s photographs of the Abstract Sublime in the forgotten fragments of the stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933).

World-renowned during the age of Art Nouveau (1890-1914), Louis Comfort Tiffany was America’s premier artist and designer of prized stained glass windows. But by the advent of The Great Depression, Tiffany’s work was openly derided as démodé, and readily assigned to trash heap. During the liquidation of Tiffany Studios in 1933, collector Vito D’Agostino (1898-1968) rescued the last fragments of broken glass as they were being smashed and thrown away into the East River.

Discovering his grandfather’s boxes of glass buried in his parent’s basement some 75 years later,  New York artist John D’Agostino reconstructs the broken pieces of Tiffany glass into large-scaled abstract photographs of biomorphic form and gestural rhythm.

Iridescent whirls of color preserved within the glass juxtapose with withering foil leaf and detritus on the surface of the glass, forming a joyous synthesis of decay and rebirth.

D’Agostino describes his working aesthetic as an imperative of The Abstract Sublime: the existential search for supernatural content disguised in the remnants of natural phenomena. Coined in 1961 by historian Robert Rosenblum, The Abstract Sublime describes the origins of Abstract Expressionism as a continuation of the sacred realms of the Romantic landscape painting of the 19^th Century, from Caspar David Friedrich and Frederick Edwin Church to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Empire of Glass, an exhibition of D’Agostino’s unique photographic vision, will be on display in the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Atelier Gallery, May 13 – June 21st.

A limited edition monograph by the artist will accompany the exhibition.

March 20, 2009 (Winchester, MA)  The future of photography is on display in the three galleries of the Griffin Museum April 8 through May 8.

Flash Forward 2008, an exhibit of select images from the fourth photography competition and book produced by the Magenta Foundation, highlights the work of emerging talents from Canada, the United Kingdom, and United States.

The aim of the project and exhibit, displayed in the museum’s Main Gallery, Atelier Gallery, and Griffin Gallery, is to connect new artists with new audiences.

“The artists represented in this collection will usher photography into its third century,’’ said exhibit curator Sara Knelman, of the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. “The range of styles and approaches to the medium are remarkable, yet the images remain connected. They share a palpable vitality, a force that says, `these are not documents, this is life!‘ ‘’

The photographs range from images of an abandoned mental asylum, to the plight of displaced Serbian Croats, to portraits of people with autism, powerful landscapes, and dramatically lit chemical experiments.

“We are honored to be the fourth and final venue for this traveling exhibition of very fresh work as seen through the eyes of these young emerging photographers,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. The Magenta Foundation is a charitable arts publishing house in Canada that promotes the work of Canadian and international contemporary artists through books and exhibitions. The exhibition is generously sponsored by TD Bank North

An opening reception is April 9, 7-8:30 PM. All are welcome.  Please RSVP by

April 2, 2009

Nov. 1, 2008  (Winchester, MA)  John Wesley Mannion, who uses various photographic approaches to explore the psychological affects of space, finds the perfect subject in the abandoned rooms of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital.

An exhibit of his images, State School, is featured in The Atelier Gallery at the Griffin November 13 through January 11.

Pennhurst was opened in a small Pennsylvania town in 1908 to care for adults and children with mental and physical disabilities. Years later, overcrowding and deplorable conditions prompted a class-action suit. In 1977, the institution was found guilty of violating patients’ constitutional rights. After a de-institutionalization process to relocate the patients, the facility was closed in 1987.

Mannion says the project “conveys the subtle texture and beauty of decay, while simultaneously confronting us with the reality of this time in our history.’’

He adds, “At first glance these images are beautiful and rich with subtle color and streaming sunlight, not unlike the interiors published in design magazines. On closer inspection, the images give way to a chaotic reality that looks neglected and ruinous.’’

Mannion is Digital Imaging Manager at Light Work/Community Darkrooms in Syracuse, NY, and teaches digital photography at Syracuse University. He has an MFA in photography and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

August 22, 2008  (Winchester, MA)  To create a picture, Pelle Cass pages  through magazines, tears out images that conform to a preconceived idea, cuts and positions the snippets on cardboard, sticks colored map pins into the assemblage, and then he photographs the end product of all his efforts.

An exhibit of his work, Pins, is featured in The Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum September 11 through November 2.

“Among other things, there is a story about color itself here; how the color of the pins match up to the color in the pieces of paper I stick them into,’’ says Cass. “And how the pins also match up to the names of colors as they appear in several of these pictures. Other pictures are monochrome; all blue magazine snippets with only blue pins, for example. In other pictures, I deliberately mismatch the pins to the areas of color I place them in. Sometimes, I think of the pins as pixels, and by placing them here and there in a pattern, it is as if I am balancing the color of my composition.’’

Cass says the pins “can suggest aerial views and maps, color coding, the human figure, vegetation, taxonomy and collecting, and naturally, pain.’’ He adds that the magazine imagery often evokes “a foreign world of luxury and ease that seems deeply strange to me.’’

“Pelle Cass’ creative journey is as interesting to me as his final photographs,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Each photograph seems to grow out of the nourishment supplied by Cass’ experience of the creative process.”

Cass, of Brookline, MA, studied photography at the University of New Mexico; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Minneapolis College of Art. He holds a B.A. in art history from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

After a hiatus of more than a decade, he resumed photographing in 2002. He is represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston and has participated in many group and solo shows. His work is held in the collections of many museums, as well as in private collections. It can be seen at www.pellecass.com.

Cass has been a Polaroid Collection Fellow. He also has been nominated for the ICA, Boston, Artist’s Prize and the Santa Fe Center for Photography Artist’s Prize.