Today we are pleased to present Atelier 32 member Adrien Bisson and his project – Alone Together, looking at the 90 days of sheltering in place during COVID.
Atelier 32 is on the walls of the Griffin until September 27th. The museum is open by appointment. We look forward to seeing you in a safe and healthy way to experience the talented Griffin artists community.
Which of these images was the impetus for this series? How did it inform how you completed the series?
© Adrien Bisson – On the Sill
I had been doing some still life images in my condo in mid-March of this year, just as most of us had become aware of the scale of the pandemic. It quickly became clear that “normal” life was going to be changed for some time. Over the weeks of the Atelier I began to realized that my project had to be a story about my newly-limited world in the condo. The photo called “On the sill” was one of the first that became part of the project and still reminds me of that early period of self-isolation, feeling unable to do much, while at the same time mourning the separation that my wife and I felt from my son and his family. The sill on which the herb plantings were placed was our window to the outside world, and the pots contained images of our granddaughter whom we could only see in photos and FaceTime.
What do you hope we as viewers take away from viewing your work?
© Adrien Bisson – Looking Out
Everyone has their own stories about the pandemic, and mine is just one of them. Part of my story is simply about our lives together in those first months, but another part is about my desire to make something come out of that isolation and to work with the limitations that were imposed on me.
© Adrien Bisson – Artifacts of the Past
How the Atelier has helped you hone your vision as an artist?
Working those weeks with Meg and the rest of the group really helped me think through and refine a vision for a project. It was incredibly helpful to get criticism and feedback on what I would produce each week, as well as to be able to see the work that the others were creating and having the opportunity to formulate and express my thoughts about it.
Tell us what is next for you creatively.
© Adrien Bisson – Daydream
I have been working for a year or so on a project about the small town in which I grew up. Because my introduction to photography came at that time and place, I am working with a toy camera in black and white for this project. I am also working on a project about the Merrimack River, which starts in the White Mountains, runs along the building in which I live, and ends up emptying into the Atlantic, in Newburyport, and how it affects the daily lives of those of us while live by it.
To see more of Adrien’s work – find it online on his website, and social media.
Web site: adrienbisson.com
Instagram: @adrien_bisson
Facebook: www.facebook.com/adrienbisson
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/AdrienBissonPhotography
The idea for my book came from several years ago when I was pondering ways to visualize questions about the believability of photographs and their presentation of the “truth”. It occurred to me to create my own sets with tiny actors and light them and photograph them depicting scenes that might have happened or could happen and that were narratively suggestive, but not singular stories- the scenes could be interpreted in multiple ways, though they almost always suggested that something “bad” had happened or was going to happen. I additionally shot my own large background photographs from real world views and blended my fake world and real world parts together visually through lighting. So, the work presents real still life objects in a false scenario against reproduced backgrounds of actual landscapes, lit in a studio, digitally recorded and presented as archivally printed transparencies in led backlit frames- multilayers of real and unreal, or true and false. When I created enough of the pieces for a series, I of course, thought of presenting them together as a book- the book form of course, makes it easier to show the work rather than hauling around light boxes, but there is something certainly missing when looking at the images on a page versus lit up on a wall. So, I included a view of several pieces lit up and installed on a wall as the first image in the book.
To answer the question about what I would want viewers to think about, I will take a few bits from my book’s introduction– The Constructed Scenarios series was created to involve viewers in the act of photographic analysis. The work walks a path between staged setup and photographically real representation. They are intentionally created to engage viewers into their invented narratives- the tableaus are specific enough to be familiar, but not so realistic as to be convincing illusions. These images are both story and still life, photographic reality and theatrical performance, small scale illusion and real world mimic. They present semi-factual information requiring analysis of their elements and an engaged interpretive skill- abilities that are sincerely needed to consider the truth in our vast image and information environments.
What would you like us as viewers to take away from your after seeing your work and words?
…I am very much influenced by various ‘ painting movements.’ ( Surrealism.
The images have not been manipulated. Everything is as seen through the viewfinder.
After seeing my book, I would like readers to feel compassionate and connected – to others on the autism spectrum and to one another. We all have some of the traits of autism, and it is through these commonalities (and hopefully through my work as well) that we can connect. I want people to have a more nuanced view of autism – not solely as a disability but as a gift as well.
These Years Gone By… is a love story told through my grandparents letters from World War II. Shortly after my grandmother’s death in 2008, my mother discovered about 300 letters that my grandparents had written to each other during World War II. They had been kept by my grandmother for over 60 years and inherited by my mother. These letters provided a new insight for my family into the lives of my grandparents during this critical time in world history. From these letters, artifacts and old family photos, I have woven together a narrative that tells the story of this challenging time in their personal history.
This project is more of a curatorial effort through family history with artifacts and old family photos. While this project is narrative driven and embraces my interest in family and world history my other work is slightly different.
My photography has always focused on images of the stuff of daily life ordinarily passed by or kept at the periphery. This approach was named ‘something and nothing’ by Charlotte Cotton in 2009 in her book ‘the photograph as contemporary art.’ These images interrogate the intimate cycles of identity, self-preservation and mortality.
Mike Callaghan’s work focuses on fragmentation, rearrangement and reinterpretation while considering the intimate cycles of identity, preservation and mortality. Mike interrogates the subtlety of gesture and the subtlety of difference in a moment when frameworks of relationships are at once prominently visible and exhaustively hidden.
My father was a superb fine art photographer. In 1999, he and I published a book together about his life’s work. The book, Reflections, consisted of 100 of his photographs and six interviews that I did with him about his aesthetic and his process. Writing the book together was an intimate and extraordinary experience. I learned so much about the life of an artist.
When my Dad died and the sun went out. I felt the night sky open to infinity, icily reaching away from me in emptiness. For two years, nothing could console me for his loss. But then I took up my camera again. Without any conscious purpose, I began to photograph at night. At first, my photos were mostly black, sometimes with a tiny dot of the moon in the far distance. But, in time, more points of light crept in. Increasingly, I became more interested in finding light than in recording darkness. The dark of night became a space with the potential for illumination, for complexity, for life and liveliness, even for warmth.
What was the inspiration for the book project?
Artist Statement As a child I spent many hours roaming the maze of rooms in my father’s furniture store. The shapes that filled these make-believe spaces, 1960’s reproductions of ‘Early American’ furniture became imprinted in my consciousness. Without realizing it I committed these shapes to memory.
