Collage, Montage, Composites
Pat Horner
Astrid Reischwitz
Portfolio Showcase
Carol Erb & Teresa Meier
Exhibition Dates: September 2 – October 1, 2017
Reception for Artists: Saturday, September 9, 5-7 pm
Pat Horner, Collage Montage
Kiki by Pat Horner, photo based collage from Collage Montage
Astrid Reischwitz, Stories from the Kitchen Table
Prickly by Astrid Reischwitz, photocollage from Stories from the Kitchen Table
Portfolio Showcase Portfolios by Carol Erb & Teresa Meier
Carol Erb, Dominion: Portraits of Animals in Captivity
Serengeti Room, composite image, pigment print by Carol Erb
Teresa Meier, The Witness Within
Hubrisa and Hamartia (Allies and Enemies), composite image, pigment print by Teresa Meier
About the Artists
Pat Horner, Collage Montage
Bowl of Fruit by Pat Horner, Mixed Media, Collage
Early in her career, Hudson Valley artist Pat Horner considered herself an artist doing photography. Later, she started to experiment with collage and mixed media, ultimately creating her personal style. Drawing on her imagination, memories, dreams and beliefs, she works with photographic images from family, nature, feminism and politics. For her, collage is a form of visual writing.
Strongly based on gender and most specifically, women, Horner’s collages/stories talk about relationships between the sexes, values, nature, war, history, fashion, indifference, blindness, and power. Horner looks for opportunities to construct oppositions and induce an emotional response. She believes that mixed media is the best common language to express her feelings and stimulate the viewer. In addition to using photographs in these works, several pieces in this exhibit have added texture using fabric, thread, digital reproductions, cut-outs and paint. This exhibition spans forty years of art-making.
Bio
Pat Horner’s work is in numerous private and public collections throughout the US including the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Center of Photography at Woodstock. She has exhibited widely in the Hudson Valley, New York City, Minneapolis, Houston and Seattle. Her work has been published throughout the Hudson Valley and worldwide including: Aperture, Utne Reader, Chronogram, UNESCO, The Progressive, Tokuma Shoten (Japan). Horner has lived in Willow, NY since 1994.
Astrid Reischwitz, Stories From the Kitchen Table
Vergissmeinnicht (Forget-me-not) by Astrid Reischwitz, photocollage, pigment print
For Astrid Reischwitz, “going home” means traveling a continent away to a village in northern Germany and her family’s old farmhouse. The house seems untouched by modern time, and sometime soon it will be left behind. When she visits, she absorbs the ingredients of home: the familiar flavors of dishes, the knick-knacks, garden flowers, fabrics, and worn kitchen tools that have been there for countless generations. Most of all, the essence of home for her is gathering around the kitchen table for a meal with family and friends to share stories old and new.
Reischwitz created “Stories from the Kitchen Table” to preserve and honor that fading way of life in her childhood home and to salute the generations of women who lived and worked under its roof. Connecting past and present, her composites include old family photos combined with fragments of her heritage. Her grandmother was a great influence. She was the keeper of local history and the family stories that were shared among women in “spin clubs,” gatherings for the purpose of spinning wool, stitching and doing needlework, “Stories from the Kitchen Table” transforms this tradition of storytelling into a visual journey.
Bio
Astrid Reischwitz’s series have appeared in numerous solo and featured exhibitions including: the Danforth Art Museum, Framingham MA; the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA; 555 Gallery, Boston MA; Soho Photo Gallery, NYC, Providence Center for Photographic Arts, RI and Sohn Fine Art Gallery, Lenox MA. Her photographs have appeared in juried group exhibitions throughout the US.
Reischwitz has been recognized with many awards including: Photolucida Critical Mass photographer (Top 50, 2016; Top 200, 2015.) Her photographs have appeared online on LensCulture, Lenscratch, Wired Japan, Il Post Italy, P3 Portugal, What Will You Remember, and 3200K, online blogs and in numerous publications throughout New England.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring portfolios by
Carol Erb & Teresa Meir
Carol Erb, Dominion: Portraits of Animals in Captivity
Wish You Were Here, composite image, pigment print by Carol Erb
“Modern civilization developed in ways to shield us from the cruelty and neglect with which we treat our fellow creatures.” In each of Carol Erb’s images, an animal has been removed from its natural environment and placed in a human space where it does not belong. The longing to be elsewhere is clear from the animal’s confinement and expression. Faded murals allude to a history of domestication and the way we can often fool ourselves into thinking of animals as extensions of our own needs and emotions. These animals are not at home here. Nonetheless, there is a disturbing beauty in their isolation.
Bio
Carol Erb is best known for creating constructed and staged digital images. Her work has been exhibited at The Center for Fine Art Photography, Phoenix Art Museum, Houston Center for Photography, and many other institutions. Her images have been featured in several publications including: Rfoto Folio, Beta developments in photography, Square Magazine, Lenscratch, and Adobe Create. In 2016, she was a finalist for Critical Mass. Erb is represented by the Sophie-Maree Gallery in the Netherlands.
Teresa Meier, The Witness Within
Complicity, composite image, pigment print by Teresa Meier
For Teresa Meier, the images in The Witness Within are the most honest expression of herself that she can give us. “They represent all the things that I saw, witnessed and experienced, disassembled, analyzed, and meticulously rebuilt into my own personal mythology.” She sought out landscapes she remembered as a child, carrying her memories with her, and let each place tell a piece of the story as she came to know it—slowly, in bits and pieces, out of time, and from many different points of view. Meier seduces viewers with rich, fantastical colors and landscapes, hoping to open their minds and hearts and send them on a journey to discover their own personal narratives.
Bio
Teresa Meier is an award winning multi-media artist based in Oregon. She holds an MFA in photography, enjoys teaching and is fascinated with telling stories through elaborately constructed digital photo-montages. Recent group exhibitions include: Center for Fine Art Photography; Light Leaked, Cosntructing Narrative; Millepiani, Loosen Art, Rome Italy; Reclaim Photography Festival, UK and uBe Art Gallery, Berkely CA. Her images have appeared in Communication Arts, Interactive Annual (Editor’s Pick), Oregon Historical Society, Serious Eats, Oregon Business and The Source. In 2016, Meier founded Light Box Laboratories, a photography based art-therapy program dedicated to serving underprivileged and at-risk teens. She firmly believes that photography changes lives. It changed hers.