May 16 to June 22, 2014
Aline Smithson
Meg Birnbaum
Portfolio Showcase ”Dress Up”, Photographers TBA
Artists’ Reception, Saturday May 17, 6-8pm
Aline Smithson, Arrangement in Green and Black,
Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother
Arrangement #3 by Aline Smithson
Meg Birnbaum, Sisters of the Commonwealth
Tori D’Affair by Meg Birnbaum
Portfolio Showcase
Call for portfolios
“Dress-Up”
deadline: April 23
tba
Aline Smithson, Arrangement in Green and Black,
Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother
This series had serendipitous beginnings. I found a small print of Whistler’s painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, at a neighborhood garage sale. The same weekend, I found a leopard coat and hat, a 1950’s cat painting, and what looked like the exact chair from Whistler’s painting. That started me thinking about the idea of portraiture, the strong compositional relationships going on within Whistler’s painting, and the evocative nature of unassuming details.
The series incorporates traditional photography techniques, yet becomes richer with the treatment of hand painting. It is my intent to have the viewer see the work in a historical context with the addition of color, and at the same time, experience Whistler’s simple, yet brilliant formula for the composition.
My patient 85 year-old mother posed in over 20 ensembles, but unfortunately passed away before seeing the finished series. I am grateful for her sense of humor and the time this series allowed us to be together.
The images were taken with a Hasselblad and printed on Ilford warm tone matt paper in two sizes, 11×14 and 16×20. It is an edition of 25 with 4 Artist’s Proofs. (above, Arrangement #14 by Aline Smithson)
Bio: After a career as a New York Fashion Editor and working along side the greats of fashion photography, Aline Smithson discovered the family Rolleiflex and never looked back. Now represented by galleries in the U.S. and Europe and published throughout the world, Aline continues to create her award-winning photography with humor, compassion, and a 50-year-old camera.
She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lishui Festival in China, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Wallspace Gallery in Seattle and Santa Barbara. In addition, her work is held in a number of museum collections. Her photographs have been featured in publications including PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Fraction, Artworks, Lenswork Extended, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.
In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. Aline founded and writes the blogzine, Lenscratch, that celebrates a different contemporary photographer each day and offers opportunity for exhibition. She has been the Gallery Editor for Light Leaks Magazine, is a contributing writer for Diffusion, Too Much Chocolate, Lucida, and F Stop Magazines, has written book reviews for photoeye, and has provided the forwards for artist’s books by Tom Chambers, Flash Forward 12, Robert Rutoed, amongst others.
Aline has curated and juried exhibitions for a number of galleries, organizations, and on-line magazines. She was an overall juror in 201 for Review Santa Fe, a juror for Critical Mass from 2009-2013, and is a reviewer at many photo festivals across the United States. Though she was nominated for The Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from 2008-2012 and for The Santa Fe Prize in Photography in 2009 by Center, she considers her children her greatest achievement.
Meg Birnbaum
Sisters of the Commonwealth
There are more than 3000 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence worldwide with eighteen Sisters, Novices, Postulates and Aspirants in the Boston area. For over three years I have joined them
as they walked in Pride Parades, screamed encouragements alongside them at Boston’s annual AIDS Walk, accompanied them to fancy fundraising dinners at city hotels, brought friends to their monthly Drag Bingo charity events and sailed with them while they sold raffle tickets on Boston harbor cruises. I also fell in love with them and became a part of their ‘family’.
The Sisters welcomed me into their lives immediately and appointed me their “photo historian”. I am amazed while watching as they artfully manifest into “avatars” of social activism with the seemingly simple goal of inspiring acceptance, compassion and the desire to shift intolerant perspectives while raising money – predominately for causes within the LGBT community. I’m amazed by the spectrum of reactions on the faces of strangers as we pass. I see the public’s ability or inability to accept – often the sister’s optimism leaves me feeling hopeful.
Photographs, and the human stories behind them can be tools for supporting social change. I hope that by sharing these photographs of the Sisters with the public, that I am contributing to and echoing their desire to build a better world. (Frieda B. Fabulous by Meg Birnbaum)
Bio: Meg Birnbaum is a fine art photographer and graphic designer from Massachusetts. She designs catalogs for the Griffin Museum of Photography and is their Director of Communications. Meg has photographs in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas) and the Lishui Museum of Photography (Lishui, China). She has had solo exhibitions in Kobe, Japan, Lishui, China, Hudson, New York and Boston, Massachusetts. In 2009 she was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Her work has been exhibited in many group show around the United States.