2010 Davis Orton Gallery Exhibitions

To our 2010 exhibiting artists – many thanks for a great year!

graphic featuring images from all 2010 exhibitors at Davis Orton Gallery

(in rows top to bottom, left to right)
Sylvia Plachy, Elliot Ross, David Moore, Vaughn Sills, Mary Kocol, Ernie Button, Rose Marasco, Dawn Southworth, Rebecca Doughty, Judith Black, Nina Bachinsky Gimmel, Lisa Kessler, Moira Barrett, David Drake, John Chervinsky, Karen Bucher, Cara Barer, Jaye R. Phillips, Lisa DahlAlso photobook artists, not pictured: Ellie Brown, Emily Corbato, Tomoko Daido, Matilde Damele, Janet Delaney, Tom Feher, Deena-Mariam Feinberg, A.E. Fournet, Peter Hoang, Nathan Larimer, Fritz Lierdtke, Henrik Malstrom, Isabelle Marcelli, Karen Marshall, Eva Koleva Timothy

PHOTOBOOK!! 2010 EXHIBITION

The Photographer and the Self-Published PhotoBook

November 18 to December 19, 2010

Opening reception Saturday, November 20, 2010, 6 to 8 p.m.

Four Best of Show PhotobooksThe self-published photobook is an exciting new avenue for photographers to present their work directly to the public.  In addition, the photobook itself can be a work of art.  As part of the Davis Orton Gallery’s commitment to showcasing the work of contemporary photographers, the Gallery presents a juried, international photobook competition.

20 Photobooks

Photographs
by ‘best of show’ artists

12 month online catalog

JUROR: PAULA TOGNARELLI
Paula Tognarelli is the Executive Director and Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. The Griffin Museum of Photography is a small photography museum whose mission is to promote an appreciation of photographic art and a broader understanding of its visual, emotional and social impact. Ms. Tognarelli is an avid collector of photography books.

PHOTOBOOK!! 2010 artists including four Best of Show (BOS)

Cara Barer, The Book’s Story (BOS)
Moira Barrett, 100 Images
Ellie Brown, Two Girls: My Sisters 1996-2006
Karen Bucher, Interior Nature (BOS)
Emily Corbato, Absolution of the Wind
Lisa Dahl, Discarded Dreams (BOS)
Tomoko Daido, White Elephant
Matilde Damele, Soul Boxing
Janet Delaney, In the Kitchen
Tom Feher, In the Navel of the Moon
Deena-Mariam Feinberg, East End
A.E. Fournet, Summer Water
Peter Hoang, After Deep Silence
Nathan Larimer, Imprint
Fritz Liedtke,  Skeleton in the Closet
Henrik Malmström, On Borrowed Time
Isabelle Marcelli,  Devenir Sujet
Karen Marshall, With a Rollieflex The 1970’s
Jaye R. Phillips,  Currents (BOS)
Eva Koleva Timothy, Lost in Learning


Two Hudson Artists: Nina Bachinsky Gimmel & David Drake

red tomato 2 by Nina Bachinsky Gimmel and Goldilocks' Studio by David Drake

Nina Bachinsky Gimmel
Transformations

“I find myself transfixed by the details of my subjects’ transformation within the cycle of life.”  In this series, Nina Bachinsky Gimmel  presents a photographic study of the strange and imperfect form of food.  These images show the bizarre, alien and sculptural side of what we eat.  Some show vegetables in the slowly decaying forms we normally overlook or discard. They are the opposite of the idealized forms we see every day in magazines and supermarkets–where looks of perfection are rendered to entice appetites. Yet they are more captivating.

Bio  A graduate of Bard College with a BA in Fine Art Photography, Nina Bachinsky Gimmel’s work has been featured in galleries throughout the Hudson Valley and Brooklyn, New York and is in several private collections. Nina’s photographs have also appeared commercially in Town & Country Magazine, New York Magazine, Inside Out, Dinner Where, Chronogram and a number of food blogs. She has studied with Stephen Shore, Larry Fink, An-My Le & Tim Davis and works with various photographic mediums including digital, medium & large format.

David Drake
Recent Work: Drawings & Paintings

David Drake’s drawings and paintings are strongly influenced by his printmaking background. While his subject matter is eclectic, as with printmaking, it is shape and the gestural line that guides his imagery.  Moving back and forth between drawing and painting, Drake will stay with a single object or idea, expanding or contracting the world around it through a series of works.  He has recently included text in some of his pieces, which confide to the viewer elements of his thought process in the midst of the work’s creation.

Bio:  David Drake received his BFA in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art where he studied with Carroll Cassill, Ralph Woehrmann and Robert Jergens.  After graduating, he taught in Cleveland Public Schools and began a life long practice of painting and drawing.  Among the galleries he has exhibited in are the Maryland Federation of Art, Annapolis; Neville Sargeant Gallery, Chicago; Southern Vermont Art Center, Manchester; and the Cabane Gallery, Phoenecia NY.  His work is represented in private and corporate collections throughout the country.


Sylvia Plachy

 September 23 to October 17

sylvia plachy, heroes square Budapest 1991

Sylvia Plachy
Apparitions

“I look for what’s hidden beyond the surface, when silence speaks.”

The Davis Orton Gallery is honored to present an exhibition of black & white and color photographs by Sylvia Plachy.  “Apparitions” is a collection of photographs of the ephemeral.

Sylvia Plachy’s works are in the permanent collections of MOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. One of her photographs, “The Confrontation,” is currently featured in the MoMA exhibition: “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.” She has had one-person shows at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, the Queens Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, and in galleries around the world.

Fly in Jane Rule's Window by Sylvia PlachyPlachy has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,  a Lucie – WIPI Distinguished Photographer’s Award, and is the 2010 recipient of the Dr. Erich Salomon Award from the German Society for Photography honoring “lifetime achievement” in photojournalism. (above: Fly in Jane Rule’s Window by Sylvia Plachy)

crone by sylvia plachyFor over eight years The Village Voice published a weekly uncaptioned, black and white photograph of Plachy’s work under the heading:”Sylvia Plachy’s Unguided Tour,” which later became a book by the same title, (Aperture, 1990) and for which she won an International Center of Photography Infinity Award. Other books include Red Light,with Jim Ridgeway (1996), Signs and Relics (2000), Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2004) which received the Golden Light Award, Goings on About Town: Photographs from the New Yorker(2007), and Out of the Corner of My Eye: de Reojo (2007).  She publishes regularly in periodicals including the The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time, Smithsonian, and. GEO. (above: Crone by Sylvia Plachy


 John Chervinsky

Ernie Button

exhibition announcement John Chervinsky and Ernie Button, August 26 to September 19

John Chervinsky
Seeing and Believing: An Experiment in Perspective

Hand of Man by John ChervinskyJohn Chervinsky’s still lifes are presented in the manner of a science demonstration or imaginary physics experiment. Chalk markings on blackboards are juxtaposed with real objects to create tensions between the physical world and the imaginary constructs that we use to define it.  With the illusory effect of the chalk that he creates, the markings appear to have depth, or to be floating in space, or on the surface plane of the photograph.  Rather than instructional, the chalk markings and blackboards place the work into the world of ideas.  “I see these photographs as posing questions without easy answers. My intent is not to express a single, narrow perspective, but to, among other things, expose the fallacy of doing so.” (left: Hand of Man by John Chervinsky)

Bio  John Chervinsky is a self taught photographer and engineer.  Since it first opened at the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2005, his “Experiment in Perspective” series has been traveling the country including solo exhibits at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Art Gallery, Batavia IL, Peer Gallery, NYC and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland OR. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Art, Portland OR; and Fidelity Investments Collection. Chervinsky spent eighteen years running a particle accelerator at Harvard and has collaborated with museums,  using accelerator technology in the analysis of art.  He currently works for Harvard University’s Rowland Institute for Science, originally founded by Polaroid’s Edwin H. Land.  His diverse scientific background is evident.

Ernie Button
Cerealism

Mighty Man Bites by Ernie Button“Art is shaped by a person’s life experiences and I am no different.” Through early childhood, raised by a single mother who struggled to keep food on the table, it was the small things that counted for Ernie Button.  “Brand name cereal was a luxury item; Cap’n Crunch made for pure breakfast heaven.” For Button, today’s cornucopia of cereals with their colorful marshmallows and bland brown objects means “playtime.” In an homage to childhood and photography, he has construct a cereal world of landscapes and portraits that have both a magical quality and an odd sense of ‘reality’.  Much of Ernie Button’s imagery focus on the individual nature of objects and the unique qualities that each possesses.  “My images often provide a voice to objects that are ignored and are frequently overlooked or taken for granted.”

Bio:  A resident of Phoenix AZ, Ernie Button’s photographs have be exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions.  His work has been featured at Lishui International Photography Festival, Lishui, China, Modified Arts, Phoenix AZ, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, CA, Mesa Contemporary Arts, Mesa AZ, Silver Eye, New Works Gallery Online, Jen Bekman Gallery / Hey Hot Shot! NYC and Anchorage Museum of History and Art. He is the recipient of many awards including the 2009 Professional Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.  Among others, his work is in the collections of the Lishui Museum of Photography,  Phoenix Commission on the Arts, and Southeast Museum of Photography.


 Rose Marasco

Dawn Southworth

images by Rose Marasco and Dawn Southworth

Rose Marasco
Tender Buttons: Women’s Domestic Objects

Rose Marasco’s work as a photographer flows from an internal exploration of how people construct meaning in their everyday lives and environments.  In her series, “Tender Buttons, ” she is inspired by the material culture of the domestic past – everyday objects women have made, used for work, collected, or arranged. “The objects have particular grace to which I respond. They contain a mystery about who owned them and what secrets each object might hold.” She reveals their power through the choices she makes to present them.

Bio:  Rose Marasco’s photographs are in public collections including the Portland Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum, New York Public Library, Fidelity Collection and Polaroid Collection. Among the honors she has received are Exhibition of the Year, New England Historical Association; Artists Fellowship, Maine Arts Council; and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Rose in a professor of photography at the University of Southern Maine and has lectured widely. In 2005 she received the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from the Santa Fe Center for Photography.

Dawn Southworth
Burnt Offerings

Dawn Southworth’s mixed media constructions are rich with cultural symbols, natural history references and intrinsic materials that speak of life’s richness and complexity.  In addition to painting and drawing, she works her materials with obsessive and repetitive methods including stitching, cobbling, and assorted fastening and wrapping techniques, along with repeated piercing and cutting and archaic marking methods with fire and burning tools. Her constructions linger like a memory, where experience and time are compressed into lasting personal and collective histories.

Bio:   Dawn Southworth’s work is widely collected and exhibited.  It has been featured in solo exhibition at Addison Gallery of American Art, DeCordova Museum, the Fuller Craft Museum and the DNA Gallery, Provincetown  and in group shows at the Southern Ohio Museum, Lancaster Museum of Art, Peligro Gallery, New Orleans and GASP Gallery, Boston.  Dawn is a recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation: Artist Resource Trust Fellowship, Blanche E. Colman Award and an NEFA/NEA Fellowship.


Vaughn Sills

David Moore

Vaughn Sills
Beyond Words

In this series of tableaus, Sills joins together the world of nature, objects found outside her family’s Prince Edward Island cottage, with the world of intellect, a 1932 Oxford English dictionary. “I chose the objects – a squirrel’s skeleton, poplar saplings, broken egg shells lying on the forest floor –  because of their extraordinary beauty and because they seem to hold the mystery of life and death.” Sills opens the aging pages of the dictionary to the word for the object, then, using wire, pushpins, tape and thread, as the “grammar” with which she works, she creates fragile constructions that, like each object, is delicate and cannot last. “Although words fall short of conveying the miraculous presence of the object, they matter; they name what I see, they describe a color, a shape, an attribute. Thus in my photographs I wish to portray not only the beauty of the object but the lure and beauty of language itself.”

Bio:  Vaughn Sills has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout the East Coast and Southern US. Her work is in a number of collections, including the DeCordova Museum, Polaroid Collections, and Fidelity Investments. She has been awarded grants from Artadia Dialogue for Art and Culture, the Polaroid Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Her book, One Family,  was published in 2001 by the University of Georgia Press. Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens will be published in fall, 2010 by Trinity University Press. Sills is a professor of photography at Simmons College.

David Moore
Recent Work

For over thirty years, David Moore has explored the daily ritual of place, realized in his paintings by dramatic lines, gesture, and color which become micro and macro metaphors for topographical and biological synapses. Much of Moore’s recent work has been inspired by the Ceide Fields in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland which he visited during a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. These are the oldest known field systems in the world, over five and a half millennia old. It is a unique Neolithic landscape of world importance, which has changed our perception of our Stone Age ancestors. The remains of stone field walls, houses and megalithic tombs are preserved beneath a blanket of peat over several square miles.

Bio:  David Moore earned his MFA degree in painting at Bard College, NY, where he also studied Theosophy, Sufism, music, photography, and the luminist paintings of the Hudson Valley. He has received residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY, and the Ballinglen Art Center in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland. Recent honors include the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Award and a Painting Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. David’s musical experience has also influenced his paintings. For the past 35 years he has revived the lost art of playing the Musical Saw. He records and performs across the country, and has been featured at Boston Symphony Hall, on ‘The Today Show’, and NPR performing jazz, blues, folk, and alternative music.


Lisa Kessler

Elliot Ross

upcoming announcement lisa kessler and elliot ross

Lisa Kessler
Seeing Pink

Lisa Kessler explores the idea of the color pink in America. “Pink is simply a color, but it is also an idea, one that confines and liberates, and ultimately holds a mirror to our culture.”  Her documentary-style photographs examine our notions of what is real and what is fake; what is biologically determined and what is socially created. Kessler captures pink as the color of love, sweetness, and vulnerability but also of power, eccentricity and pornography.  Just as the the idea of pink can represent a wide spectrum of meaning, her photographs provoke a similarly broad array of emotions.

Bio:  Lisa Kessler’s photographs are in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was a finalist for the Honickman Foundation First Book Prize in Photography, Center for Documentary Studies for her work on the clergy sex abuse crisis. Her short film “Heart in the Wound,” exploring the impact of that crisis through the voices of survivors, premiered at the Boston International Film Festival in 2009 and was shown at the Fear No Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah. “Facing Peace,” a documentary portrait series in collaboration with families surviving violence was exhibited at Lesley University in 2008. Kessler teaches photography at Montserrat College of Art and is currently preparing “Seeing Pink” for book publication.

Elliot Ross
Animal

Elliot Ross explains that each image in Animal “is not only a portrait of a non-human animal; it is, in many ways, both a self-portrait (for each of us has, to some degree, DNA in common with other species) and also a question: What can be knowable and what is unknowable of individuals of other animal species?” Ross photographs his subject animals and applies digital imaging techniques he describes as “akin to sculpting with light.” He strips away their actual surroundings to show them against a black background that adds depth, cognition and personality. Thus each of his numbered beings is a subjective and mysterious work which grows out of the objective record that a photograph represents.

Bio:  Elliot Ross’s work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium and the Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley.  Images from “Animal” were recently exhibited in a solo show at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA and in group shows:  “New Visionaires,” New York Photo Festival, Brooklyn and “The Museum of Unnatural History,” ClampArt, New York.  Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam will publish the artist’s book “Animal” in the fall of 2010.

Mary Kocol

Rebecca Doughty

May 6 – May 30, 2010   Reception: Saturday, May 8,  6 – 8p.m.

Mary Kocol
Gardens & Arboreta

 

Mary Kocol photographs the landscapes of the Northeast coming back to life – the short-lived and fresh color transformations in spring and early summer. This series was made with a plastic Diana camera.  Kocol has been making pictures with this toy camera for over twenty years. “I’m intrigued by how the plastic lens interprets light – with luminescent color and soft glare.” Light is an important subject in Kocol’s work and the distinctive soft focus of the camera lends a surreal, nostalgic, and ephemeral quality to her photographs.

Bio: Mary Kocol is a fine art and editorial photographer in Boston. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), she has received many grants for photography, animation and filmmaking. In 2009 she was a finalist in the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition, Kew Gardens, England. Most recently, Kocol has exhibited at Gallery Naga, Boston, MA and the Julia Margaret Cameron Museum, Isle of Wight, England. Her work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Albert Museum and many others public and private collections. Editorial clients include The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, and Doubleday.

Rebecca Doughty
Short Stories, painting

Drawing is at the core of Rebecca Doughty’s work. As a kid, Doughty absorbed the print and moving pictures of the time– comics and funnies, Looney Tunes and MAD. The images that most intrigued her were wry and deceptively simple, a description that well applies to Doughty’s work. “I studied the protagonists engaged in their curious adventures, the humor and satire, and the deeper, darker subtexts.” The animal characters that inhabit Doughty’s paintings and drawings represent a kind of theatre, where stories and complex human predicaments are told through subtle gestures. “I find within the limits I’ve set regarding materials and scale, there’s a mine of expressive possibilities.”

Bio:  Rebecca Doughty has been making paintings and drawings since the 1980’s. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center – New York City, the Boston Drawing Project, DeCordova Museum, Clark Gallery, and the Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown.  She has received fellowships from Ucross Foundation, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, and awards including The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation, and Blanche E. Colman Foundation. Her work is in numerous public and private collections.


 Judith Black

Moira Barrett

April 1 to May 2, 2010

Reception:  Saturday, April 10, 6 – 8p.m.

Judith Black
In My Own Backyard

Using images of family as a touchstone for memories reveals a deep collective need to make our personal narratives and memoirs a true representation of the past, which of course they can never be. In thinking about how to make sense of almost 30 years of photographing my immediate family and self, I realized that the photographs I exhibited were our family album made public, or perhaps the reverse, my “art” made useful within the domestic space. The photographs are actual physical memories, evoking stories, truths and lies, all of which are ever changing.* For this exhibit, I work with one theme, one location, one space in which many of my photographs have been taken: the backyard.

*Abstract from a paper delivered at National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists: School of the Visual Arts, New York City, New York, 2002

Bio:  Judith Black is a professor of Photography at Wellesley College. Her research and work examine the self and family in the genre of family portraiture. Her photography has centered on black and white large format portraiture of her immediate and extended family.  Black received a B.F.A. degree from Quincy College, Quincy, IL and an M.S. in Visual Studies at M.I.T.  Early on, a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled her to pursue her work documenting her family.  Her photographs have appeared in numerous national and international exhibitions and publications over the past 20 year and is in museum collections nationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Polaroid International Collection, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, and the Houston Museum of Fine Art.

Moira Barrett
Thicker Than Water

 

In life, we all struggle to find a place of comfort and connection, whether it is in our biological families or the circle of friends that we call our families. We all come into and leave this world alone; each of us falling prey to a feeling of separation that can only be relieved by finding our own point of kinship with others. In “Thicker Than Water,” I explore these points of connection and alienation as they pertain to my own family. As a lesbian couple with an adopted Chinese daughter, we each try to make connections that will comfort us and define who we are. Although we find warmth in our created family, it is not always enough to protect us from the undercurrent of alienation that runs through us all. We must work hard to maintain the connections that keep us grounded and feeling that we are loved. My aim is to explore the push and pull of these contrasting feelings as expressed in our family dynamic, while we question and test our identities and relationships.

Bio:  Photographer Moira Barrett is studying for her MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University/Art Institute of Boston (AIB.) A graduate of  Buffalo State University with a BA in Art, over the years, she has worked in a variety of positions in the graphic arts industry including silkscreen artist, color lab manager, and photo retoucher while completing coursework in photography and graphic design.  Moira is married to Johanna Schulman, a financial planner, lives in Cambridge, MA and is the parent of Annie, age 11.