Thanks to our 2015 Exhibiting Artists.
Kay Kenny, Miska Drascoczy, Mark Lyon, Robin Michal, Thomas Holton, Edie Bresler,
Mary Beth Meehan, Eleanora Ronconi Keith Johnson, Ruth Wetzel,
Steffen Kloster Poulsen,Peter Stern, Rebecca Clark, Daniel Mosher Long,
Bridget Murphy Milligan, Neil C. Jones, Gail Samuelson, Sharon Arnold,
Ellen Cantor, Norm Diamond/Photobook2015 best-of-show: Mara Catalan,
Annna Leigh Clem, Keron Psillas, Andi Schreiber,
Photographers of The Plural “I” Group Show and PHOTOBOOK 2015
PHOTOBOOK 2015
Two Exhibitions
& Online Catalog/Gallery
Davis Orton Gallery November 21 to December 20, 2015
Griffin Museum of Photography January 14 to March 6, 2016
67 Shore Rd. Winchester MA 01890
Best of Show: Mara Catalan, Anna Leigh Clem, Keron Psillas, Andi Schreiber. Eldar Akbarov – Deja Vu, William Ash – Earth Water Fire Wind Emptiness: Tokyo Landscapes, Leslie Hall Brown – Through The Garden Of Childhood, Karen Bucher – Shadow Run, Mike Callaghan – Com (Me N Cement Notes), Mara Catalan – Williamsburg: A Place I Once Called Home, Anna Leigh Clem – Grounded, David Curtis – In The Moment: City Spaces, City Faces, Mark Diamond – Limitless World, Mario Digirolamo – Visione, Melissa Eder – Sunshine Daydream (Dedicated To Jerry Garcia), Michael B. Endy – Lost Highway: A Photographic Hymn To New Jersey, Jeff Evans – What’s Wrong With This Picture, Bill Gore – SWIPE, Paul Hockett – Negative Memory, Michael Hunold – The Stone Room, Jaclyn Kain – Postcard Stories, Sachiko Kawanabe – Sononite, Ken Konchel – Architectonic, Jack La Forte – The Lost Glove Series, Liza Macrae – Together In A Sudden Strangeness, GE Mckerrihan – Hearing Shadows Call, Linda Morrow – A Celebration Of Plums, Michael Nelson – Photos From Cuba, Cynthia O’Dell – 0-6, Nick Pedersen – Sumeru, Jaye R. Phillips – Into The Dark Of Night, Keron Psillas – Loss And Beauty, Gilbert Rios – Look/See, Don Russell – Cowboys Of Color, Andi Schreiber – Drift, Dan R Talley – Yesterday’s Coffee, Tomorrow’s Eggs, Andrew MK Warren – Some Pictures, Rosemarie Zens – Carousel Of Time
Keepsakes
Gail Samuelson
Sharon Arnold
Portfolio Showcase
Ellen Cantor and Norm Diamond
October 10 to November 15, 2015
Reception: Saturday, October 10, 5-7pm
Gail Samuelson, Keep it for Luck
Bra and Hydrangea by Gail Samuelson
Sharon Arnold, After the Wedding Dresses
Fireworks by Sharon Arnold
Ellen Cantor, I Can Only Remember What I Don’t Forget
Memories by Ellen Cantor
Norm Diamond, What Is Left Behind
Yellow Airplane by Norm Diamond
Gail Samuelson, Keep it for Luck
Aunt Florence’s Mink by Gail Samuelson
Keep It For Luck is a loving tribute to two important women in Gail Samuelson’s life, her mother, Martha and her favorite aunt, Florence. They worked in separate family businesses in the “rag trade” on Seventh Avenue. Florence was chief designer of classic women’s dresses in the 1950’s and 1960’s, while Martha was the salesperson for girls’ party dresses in the 1970’s. The keepsakes Samuelson photographs belonged to Martha and Florence. They each had their own personal style and so did their clothes.
While Martha didn’t love her wedding dress – it wasn’t white or fancy –she kept it; the fragile beige silk gave way as Samuelson arranged it for the camera. Her mother also saved intimate garments from when she was first married. A satin negligee shimmers with its pinked seams, hand-sewn zipper, and pleated bodice. The long line bra molded her to the ideal shape pictured in Ladies Home Journal. “Who would have known she was so sexy?”
Florence, born in NYC, never left except to study fashion design in Paris. Always smartly dressed, she wore black and white and carried crocodile and beaded handbags – each with a tissue tucked inside to blot her deep red lipstick. Florence was superstitious –shamrocks, horseshoes, and elephants decorated her fabrics. As Samuelson says, “She knew with hard work and good luck, she could make a killing.”
Bio: Gail Samuelson has exhibited her work recently at 555 Gallery, Boston; Photography Now, CAA gallery, Cambridge; The Griffin Museum of Photography, and Kiernan Gallery, Lexington VA. Owner of Gail Samuelson Photography, she has been a portrait and events photographer for many years. Gail is represented in Boston by 555 Gallery.
Sharon Arnold, After the Wedding Dresses
Sharon Arnold produces highly staged and manipulated images that conjure a dream-like state of both loss and strength. After the Wedding Dresses, is a visual statement of life after the wedding day. Arnold began this project with traditional images of dresses. Over time they evolved into metaphors on marriage, becoming visual tales of relationships: soulful and interior. Pearls sliding off a strand with a broken clasp. The unraveling of years, words shot like arrows through the soul, the alienation of a union, the isolation of a marriage in ruin. Arnold uses combinations of photographic, painterly and digital editing techniques to create her pieces.
(image: Sticks and Stones Will Break Your Bones by Sharon Arnold)
Bio Sharon Arnold is a self-taught artist who uses film, collage, dyes, oil tints and digital techniques to produce her archival pigment prints. Her earlier images are reminiscent of 19th-century, hand-colored monochromes. She and her sisters grew up on a back rural road playing in my father’s junk yard. From an early age she made “dioramas”; stage sets made from bits and pieces of junk, which she photographed with her Baby Brownie. “It was a way to express my thoughts and moods.” She was a writer for years, but in 1988 she returned to the camera and dioramas, creating twilight worlds and inviting the viewer into this private place of dreams, encounters, and not so tame fairy tales, hoping it will seem strangely familiar.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring
portfolios by Ellen Cantor and Norm Diamond
Ellen Cantor, I Can Only Remember What I Don’t Forget
Ribbons and Memories by Ellen Cantor
“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that is gone forever, impossible to reproduce” Karl Lagerfeld
I Can Only Remember What I Don’t Forget is about memory, loss, aging and the creation of a legacy for the future. Ellen Cantor photographs photographs and other keepsakes as they existed at her parents’home, creating a way of exploring her personal history and the process of aging. The series recontextualizes a way of looking at photographs and items from family archives. Although the individual moments may be impossible to reproduce, “they linger in my mind as I sift through piles of photographs to recreate a personal narrative.”
“I created these images to hold on to things that are slipping away, not only from me personally, but from my family and eventually all of us. It is to remind us, also, that there is and was a world before technology.”
Bio Ellen Cantor has exhibited her work in Los Angeles, throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Venues include: UCLA School of Medicine, Palos Verdes Art Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL; Galerie Nadine Feront, Brussels, Belgium; Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; Los Angeles Center of Photography; Yeosu International Art Festival and International Biennale in Yeosu, Korea. She is a 2015 finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Her work has appeared in ezines: Lenscratch.com, f-stopmagazine.com, fractionmagazine.com and Silvershotz.
Cantor is a graduate of UCLA Interior and Architectural Design Program. After a career in Interior Design, she shifted her focus into fine art photography in 2000.
Norm Diamond, What Is Left Behind
Wedding Night Negligee by Norm Diamond
Norm Diamond explores estate sales. He searches for objects that suggest the personal stories of their owners. Besides making photographs at the sales themselves, he often purchases items and photographs them in other settings. In so doing, he amends their stories and brings back memories of what his parents left behind for his sister and him. As memories build, so do reminders of the rapid passage of time.
What Is Left Behind also leads Diamond forward. “After all, my children may someday hold an estate sale for the items that I leave behind. And I wonder… what will these things say to strangers?”
Bio Norm Diamond’s photographs have been exhibited in several juried group shows including Houston Center for Photography’s Membership Exhibition and A Smith Gallery, TX and online galleries including donttakepictures.com and Black Box Gallery. Diamond and his series What Is Left Behind has been named a finalist in Photolucida’s 2015 Critical Mass competition. His work has also been featured on Elizabeth Avedon’s blog.
Diamond is now a fulltime fine art photographer after a career in interventional radiology. He has studied with Aline Smithson, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Sean Kernan, Arno Minkkinen and, from 2013 to the present, he has been mentored by Cig Harvey. In addition to his teachers, he attributes much of his success in photography to his experiences as a physician.
Rebecca Clark
Daniel Mosher Long
September 5 to October 4, 2015
Portfolio Showcase
Bridget Murphy Milligan and Neil C. Jones
Rebecca Clark, Ladies in Waiting
Hummingbird 2015 by Rebecca Clark
Daniel Mosher Long, Miscellanea
In Place of Memory by Daniel Mosher Long
Bridget Murphy Milligan, Fireside Tales: a convergence of fact and fiction
A Great Sorrow by Bridget Murphy Milligan
Neil C. Jones, Pursuing the Horizon: The poetry of Stephen Crane
Many Workman Built a Huge Ball of Masonry by Neil C. Jones
About the Artists
Rebecca Clark, Ladies in Waiting
Rebecca Clark photographically collects details of old master paintings – expressions, gestures, plants, animals, landscapes – any elements she finds intriguing. Later, she transforms the art historical fragments, weaving them into compositions often including patterns, textures, and colors photographed on her daily walks. Ladies in Waiting features portraits of women and girls that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The subjects’ idealized beauty and mysterious gazes reveal nothing of their inner lives. By altering the context of the images, Clark questions and subverts the original meaning of the paintings, creating fictional back-stories for these women. She covers her pigment prints with layers of encaustic medium to create rich, luminous, and irregular surfaces. (above: Red Beads by Rebecca Clark)
Bio: Rebecca Clark is a Professor of Art at the Community College of Rhode Island where she has taught photography since 1990. Recent exhibitions include Fitchburg Museum of Art; Dehn Gallery, Manchester CT; Artspace, Hartford CT and Tilt Gallery, Phoenix AZ. She will have a solo exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2016. Clark holds an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Daniel Mosher Long, Miscellanea
In Miscellanea, Daniel Mosher Long photographs natural objects and cultural artifacts often in juxtaposition. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, the cabinet of curiosities celebrated the act of collection for its own sake. Specimens – organic remains or all sorts – and manmade objects were artfully arranged side by side for the viewer’s amusement. “I too collect,” says Long. “Since I was a young boy I have been interested in the flotsam and jetsam of yesteryear. The artist explores and exploits the attraction-repulsion response evoked by vivid color and precise detail (attraction) and insects, reptiles, and all things post mortem (repulsion). He often arranges and pictures objects in ways to confound one’s sense of relative scale. Long uses a process unique to digital photography: focus stacking. This software was developed for scientific research and allows a macro photographer to shoot multiple frames, each focused on a different plane in space and then merges exposures. He makes up to 30 exposures for each composition. (above: natura morta by Daniel Mosher Long)
Bio: Daniel Mosher Long is a professor of photography at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut. Long’s work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast including New England Photographers Biennial, Danforth Museum of Art; Griffin Museum/Flash Forward Festival, Boston; Bruce S. Kershner Gallery, Fairfield CT and Mugar Art Gallery, Colby-Sawyer College.. His work was featured in and on the cover” of Tonelit online magazine and as the highlight”of Canadian Adore Chroma Magazine, both in 2014. He is a recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Artist Fellowship. Long studied photography at Bennington College, Rhode Island School of Design and Purdue University.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring
portfolios by Bridget Murphy Milligan and Neil C. Jones
Bridget Murphy Milligan, Fireside Tales: a convergence of fact and fiction
The Little Land by Bridget Murphy Milligan
One of the oldest art forms, storytelling is both collective and ephemeral. It embraces everything from rumors, jokes, gossip around the kitchen table, to stories once told around the fireside. In oral tradition, the life of a story undergoes multiple adaptations. In Fireside Tales, Bridget Murphy Milligan asks, “With technology constantly changing and reinventing the way we communicate and share with one another, what will become of traditional storytelling?” Here she presents her solution for preserving the tradition of Irish storytelling through the language of photography.
Milligan’s digital collages combine photographs taken while traveling in Ireland with scanned drawings, paintings, and pages from antique storybooks. With these elements she recreates popular Irish stories of faith, mystery, myth, humor, history, and legends.
Bio Bridget Murphy Milligan’s artwork explores the relationship between photography, communication, and storytelling. She has exhibited in group shows throughout the US and in solo shows at, among others, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh and the galleries of Miami University, Kent State University, and the University of Missouri. Milligan was a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass competition. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at The College of Wooster, Wooster OH.
Neil C. Jones, Pursuing the Horizon: The poetry of Stephen Crane
I Stood Upon a High Place by Neil C. Jones
Stephen Crane is most famous for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, but he was also an accomplished poet who used an impressionistic, naturalistic literary style, resulting in brief, powerful and bleak verse. As a practitioner of naturalism, Crane often used symbolism rather than realism in his writing. Literary scholar William Peden once said of Crane’s style, “[It] is often more impressionistic than photographic.” Because of Crane’s brevity in his prose, he leaves a great deal for his reader to imagine. Here, photographer Neil C. Jones enters with constructed images that fill the cracks and spaces surrounding Crane’s allegories.
Bio Neil C. Jones is an artist and college art educator in Baltimore. His work has been exhibited nationally, including Atlanta, Baltimore, New York City and Washington, DC, and internationally in Heidelberg, Germany, and Lacoste, France. As a working photographer for more than 15 years, his images have been published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Military Times, Press Box, Soldiers Magazine, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Stars and Stripes and other magazines and newspapers around the world. In 2012, he was awarded the Individual Artist Award for Photography by the Maryland State Arts Council. Jones holds an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MA in Digital Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a BA in English Literature and Film Studies from the University of Delaware.
Exhibition Dates: August 1 – 30, 2015
Reception for Artists: Saturday, August 1, 5-7 pm
Illustrated Catalog of Plural I Exhibition
A group exhibition exploring diverse visions about queerness through photo-based works & video that question the binary, resists the prescribed gender norms & challenges assumptions about the ways things are placed within neat boundaries.
32 works by 16 artists selected through international competition.
Conceived & curated by Nandita Raman
Jurors Nandita Raman & Karen Davis.
Artists, Top to bottom, left to right: Natalie Kirk, Holly A. Lay, Ashlie DaCosta, Linda Troeller, Laurie Blakeslee, Chris Maliga, Preston Gannaway, Lucas Andahl, Julian Gray, Gary Beeber, Anna Brody, Phaedra Call, Ellen Feldman, Eva Weiss, Patricia Silva (video), David Lykes Keenan (video)
Keith Johnson
Ruth Wetzel
June 27 to July 26, 2015
Reception: Saturday, June 27 5-7pm
also: 10 Gallery Stroll BeLo3rd
portfolio showcase
Steffen Kloster Poulsen & Peter Stern
Keith Johnson, The Chosen Place
Untitled #7 from Chosen Place by Keith Johnson
Ruth Wetzel, Swamp Spaces
4-17 from Swamp Places by Ruth Wetzel
Steffen Kloster Poulsen Bunker
#1 from Bunker by Steffen Kloster Poulsen
Peter Stern Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay
Tidal Figure by Peter Stern
About the Artists
Keith Johnson, The Chosen Place
For Keith Johnson, it all started in 1980 when his Seneca Point cottage was built by Canandaigua Lake (Ontario County NY). It is a beautiful location called Kanadarqua by the Senecas meaning “The Chosen Spot.” Over the years he stood on the deck looking out on Bare Hill and Vine Valley making hundreds of pictures from five slightly different places on the deck. He photographed the sky, the water, the light and the feeling of the place. Storms, fireworks on July 4, flares on Labor Day, a bit of Spring or Fall, clouds and all, never intending to do anything with these pictures. Thus, for many years, he simply collected images. Later, he grouped them by mood, or subject or color. Finally, he was able to see relationships and juxtapositions that previously had past him by. These compositions are the result. (left: #13 from Chosen Place by Keith Johnson)
Bio: Keith Johnson’s work is in the collections of, among others, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), George Eastman House, and Center for Creative Photography. Recent solo shows include George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Griffin Museum, Winchester, MA; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; FotoFest, Houston, TX; Panopticon Gallery, Boston MA; Nelson Hancock Gallery, Brooklyn NY and Wall Space Gallery in Seattle WA.
He is a recipient of two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowships and residencies at Light Work and Visual Studies Workshop, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor, CT. He is on the summer faculty at Penland School of Crafts, Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), and Maine Media Workshop, and is a thesis mentor at SVA in NY and AIB in Boston. Johnson received his MFA from RISD studying with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind following a year at Visual Studies Workshop with Nathan Lyons.
Ruth Wetzel Swamp Spaces
Ruth Wetzel grew up in a swamp in the hamlet of Katonah, NY, in a neighborhood of split-ranch houses that had been built during a drought. When the drought ended, every home had to be surrounded by drainage ditches. Behind her house, there were swamps everywhere, and she spent her childhood in perpetually wet sneakers, bog-hopping, building tree forts and drawing.
Wetzel’s work, in a variety of mediums, has always been a response to landscape. Five years ago she turned her attention to swamps, first through drawing and printing and now, through photography, where she explores how the phenomena of reflection, transparency and perspective collide to create visual intrigue.
“I wear waders and trudge gingerly on squishy surfaces. I am often thigh-high in the water and sometimes slowly sinking. Beavers, turtles, frogs and ducks are my companions and soundtracks, and from my lower-than-normal-height point of view, I see more from an animal’s perspective.”
Wetzel’s close-up views remove the landscape’s orientation and allow the abstract qualities and gestures to shine. Expectations of perspective are interrupted. Flora in spatially perplexing views questions familiar spatial arrangements and the delicacy of surface films, leaves, and twigs contrast against the powerful gestures of branches and swaths of sunlight.
Bio: Ruth Wetzel (Stone Ridge, NY) has spent 25 years interpreting the landscape in a variety of mediums. She has been awarded residencies at Platt Clove, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop and Vermont Studio Center and received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, Baltimore City, and the E.D. Foundation. Wetzel has exhibited widely throughout New York and New England. Her recent work in photography is in the permanent Collection of Orange Regional Medical Center and has been shown at Gallery Sansquoit, SUNY/Ulster; NoBo Gallery, Hudson NY; Westport Library and the offices of Alfandre Architecture.
Features and reviews of her work have appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal, Chronogram (including cover), Kingston Times and Catskill Mountain Region Guide, among others. She received an MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art, and holds a B.S. in Design from Buffalo State College.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring
portfolios by Steffen Kloster Poulsen and Peter Stern
Steffen Kloster Poulsen, Bunker
The Danish government has initiated a program to remove hundreds of bunkers from its beaches for the safety of beach goers. The Germans built these bunkers during their occupation of Denmark in the Second World War as a defense against Allied Forces. Poulsen has memories from childhood of playing with his sister in and around the bunkers during family trips to the coast. Poulsen is currently documenting these “involuntary monuments of war” to tell their story before they descend into the sea of forgotten history.
“Their removal will not only leave a hole in the history of my country but also in my childhood. The bunkers themselves have transformed into mere shapes and remain only as symbols of a bygone era in an ocean of mist. These giants’ gentle vulnerability and inevitable slow, natural eradication speak of our own fragile existence.”
Poulsen uses a pinhole lens in combination with a pushed black-and-white film to create these grainy and mysterious images and to reflect upon the intangible feeling of an unexperienced national history and the muddy warmth of distant memories.
Bio: Steffen Kloster Poulsen is an emerging photographer from Denmark. He is equally at home using the darkroom, digital and alternative photographic processes and works to select the best method for actualizing his ideas. Poulsen has exhibited his work recently in Copenhagen at Galleri Krebsen and Gallery Monitor (solo) and Gallery Rotor 2 in Gothenburg, Sweden. This is his first exhibition in the United States.
Peter Stern Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay
Flying low and slowly, pilot and photographer Peter Stern studies the landscapes below, interpreting them with an intimacy that reflects his personal connection to the varied geographies of the Mid-Atlantic Region where he lives (Baltimore) and photographs.
In this series Stern presents the rich and diverse ecology of the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay while also suggesting spiritual, animal and human symbolism he finds there. While the region has suffered from development and exploitation for centuries, these images show the strength and resilience of Coastal ecosystems, and how both the forces of nature and the efforts of environmental preservation groups have helped to preserved and improved the health and vitality of these unique areas.
Thomas Holton
Edie Bresler
May 16 to June 21, 2015
Reception: Saturday, May 16, 5-7pm
portfolio showcase
Mary Beth Meehan and Eleonora Ronconi
Thomas Holton, The Lams of Ludlow Street
Spring Break 2014 by Thomas Holton
Edie Bresler, We Sold a Winner
Owner and Winner, Herndon VA by Edie Bresler
Mary Beth Meehan, Undocumented
Guinea-Bissau I – Brockton, Massachusetts by Mary Beth Meehan
Eleonora Ronconi, Serás Mis Ojos
Mi vestido de primera comunión by Eleonora Ronconi
About the Artists
Thomas Holton, The Lams of Ludlow Street
Bath time, 2003 by Thomas Holton
Artist Statement: In The Lams of Ludlow Street, one family’s life, from 2002 to the present, unfolds in a 350 square foot apartment in New York City’s Chinatown.
Growing up in New York City and half Chinese, photographer Thomas Holton spent a considerable amount of time in Chinatown but never experienced a bond or connection to the neighborhood or the culture. While his grandparents had lived there, he always felt he was a visitor.
20002: In 2002, Holton met the Lam family (Steven, Shirley, Michael, Franklin and Cindy.) From then to 2005, he photographed the Lams, returning several times with prints. He increasingly began to participate in their everyday family rituals and to recognize the dynamics and relationships within their family. Eventually, he began to feel like family.
2010: While he maintained contact with the Lams, he didn’t photograph them again until 2010 when he felt compelled to capture the new reality in their lives. The Lams had gone through circumstances which changed the tone and atmosphere in a heavier, lonelier direction. The family he photographed earlier now seemed broken up physically and emotionally. The parents were no longer a married couple but technically still living together at Ludlow Street. For the children, schoolwork became more time consuming and difficult, and playtime was over. In addition, all three Lam children were now teenagers, which brought its own complex emotional and physical issues.
2013: The photographs made since 2013 presents another chapter in the Lams’ lives. Steven and Shirley are now divorced, and Steven has moved to New Jersey. Despite the official break, Holton, these days, spends more time with the Lams as a whole family. There seems to be a sense of peace and closure in their lives. “While it is far from perfect, whose life is?”
Bio: Photographer Thomas Holton’s work has been exhibited widely, including: The Museum of the City of New York, New York Public Library, Sasha Wolf Gallery and the China-Lishui International Photography Festival. In 2005 he was one of the twenty-four photographers chosen by the Art + Commerce Festival for Emerging Photographers, and in 2006, American Photo magazine named him one of the country’s ten best Young Photographers.
Kehrer Verlag will publish his work, The Lams of Ludlow Street, as a hardbound monograph in the fall of 2015. Additionally, the Lams work was published in Aperture (2007), featured twice by The New York Times (2008 and 2012) as well as published in numerous other magazines, newspapers and websites.
Edie Bresler, We Sold a Winner
The Patel Family: Considered a very lucky store by neighborhood players, they have sold two $1,000,000 scratch tickets in the last ten years. by Edie Bresler
Edie Bresler’s photographs and their accompanying stories are portraits of resilience, desire, seduction and a changing American dream. She focuses on main street America through the lens of state lotteries. In towns and cities across the country, small family owned convenience and liquor stores are the largest group of retailers selling lottery tickets. Many owners are immigrants while others are the third or fourth generation to run the family business. They are hard-working small business owners looking for their piece of the American dream. If they sell a winning jackpot ticket they receive a bonus commission, ranging from $5000 to $500,000 depending on state rules. Owners who sell a winning ticket that is never claimed, do not receive their bonus commission and every year hundreds of millions of dollars in winning tickets are unclaimed.
This complex local economy is massive and often overlooked. Since 9/11, the US government has spent $536 billion on the war in Afghanistan while Americans spent $532.6 billion buying lottery tickets. In lieu of higher taxes, state-sponsored gaming sells hope through hype. Whether you are pro, con or indifferent, it is likely your community relies on its share of lottery profits. Bresler seeks greater awareness and empathy for the people and places on the front line of this hidden economy and the value they provide within our communities.
Bio: Edie Bresler has exhibited in solo shows at the Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography in California; the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Boston Center for the Arts in Massachusetts; Visual Studies Workshop and CEPA in New York and in numerous group exhibitions. She is a Critical Mass 2014 finalist. Features include Slate Magazine, Photo District News, Lenscratch, Business Insider, Esquire Russia, Feature Shoot, the PBS show Greater Boston with Emily Rooney, Virgin Airlines Voyeur Magazine, and Social Documentary. Bresler has been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Simmons College Faculty Fund for Research, and the Berkshire Taconic Artist Resource Trust. She writes regularly for Photograph Magazine and leads the photography program at Simmons College in Boston.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring
portfolios by Mary Beth Meehan and Eleonora Ronconi
Newcomers: The Immigrant Experience
Mary Beth Meehan, UNDOCUMENTED
Guatamala I – Providence, Rhode Island by Mary Beth Meehan
Between 11- and 20-million undocumented immigrants live in the United States today, fueling a national fury over citizenship and immigration policy. Many of these people are deeply embedded in our communities, yet have been painted with one brush as “drug smugglers, human smugglers, gang members and child molesters” (Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce). Because they cannot come forward to defend themselves, their true identities as people remain in the shadows.Meehan’s photographs were made inside the homes of undocumented residents in New England. By exploring the texture of their living spaces, Meehan’s goal is to make visible the lives of these human beings who must, for legal and political reasons, remain invisible.
“I ask myself if I can enter the home of a human being who is afraid to be identified, and use photography to make him or her somehow seen? My hope is to open a window onto these almost forbidden spaces, ones that are, ironically, full of the daily ordinariness of life.”
Bio: Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and educator whose work engages the communities in which she lives. Her goal is to use photography to create connections among people that may be obscured by conceptions of economics, politics, or race.
Her work has been published in 6Mois Magazine and Le Monde (France), The New Statesman (U.K.), Bird Magazine (Japan), and featured on New York Times: LENS; it has been shown in solo exhibitions at Smith College and at the Griffin Museum of Photography, was exhibited at the Ring Cube Gallery, Tokyo, and the Photographic Resource Center, Boston, and was featured in two New England Photography Biennial exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
A former staff photographer at The Providence Journal, Meehan has since contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, and received the 2012 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography. She was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been honored by Pictures of the Year International and the National Conference for Community and Justice.
Eleonora Ronconi, Serás Mis Ojos
El lavadero de mi tía by Eleonora Ranconi
Eleonora Ronconi has lived in California since 1998, but Buenos Aires remains her home. As she struggled to adapt to living in the United States, she began to lose connection to her identity and her grounding. Then, on one of her trips to Buenos Aires in 2011, she decided to revisit the place she knew so well. She photographed things that had been an important part of her life – family photographs, her friends, her first communion dress, her aunt – her only close relative – and places she visited with her father who passed away when she was a teenager. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces started coming together – reconstructing a life that had begun to feel out of focus.
Bio: Eleonora Ronconis photographs have been published by Adore Chroma, Aesthetica Magazine, the Maine Department of Labor, F-Stop Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Lenscratch and Le Journal de la Photographie among others. She is a Critical Mass Finalist for 2012. Her first solo exhibition was in her native Buenos Aires in 2009. Recent group shows include work at The Griffin Museum of Photography, Rayko Gallery, Wall Space Gallery and Triton Museum of Art.
Ronconi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She settled in California In 1998 and now lives and works in Santa Clara, CA where she specializes in conference interpreting.
Kay Kenny
Miska Draskoczy
portfolio showcase
Robin Michals and Mark Lyon
Kay Kenny, Into the Night in the Middle of Nowhere
Cactus With Slip by Kay Kenny
Miska Draskoczy, Gowanus Wild
Egret from Gowanus Wild by Miska Draskoczy
Portfolio Showcase
Night Photography
From Cities to Towns to Way, Way Beyond
Robin Michals, Castles Made of Sand
Backhouse Angler’s Fishing Club, E. 14th Road, Broad Channel, Queens, NY, January 23, 2015
by Robin Michal
Mark Lyon, Bay Views
Foam and Wash, Poughkeepsie by Mark Lyon
Kay Kenny, Into the Night in the Middle of Nowhere
I
nto the Night in the Middle of Nowhere is an artist’s celebration of lonely corners of our rural landscapes. In a series of long exposures that capture the intense activity of the night sky, silhouettes of the darkened landscape are backdrops for the illuminated otherworldly events taking place below. Kenny places familiar objects and often herself – still or moving- in these nocturnal settings. With only the stars and moon for ambient light, she employs flashlights, car headlights and improvised devices to create the otherworldliness of her scenes.
(above: Blue Tarp by Kay Kenny)
Bio: Kay Kenny’s work is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Buhl Collection, and Southern Alleghenies Museum, among others. She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows including: Dorsky Museum of Art, Ashville Museum of Art, Trenton Museum and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Kenny received 2009 Lucie Awards’ Honorable Mention in FineArts Photography and is a three-time recipient of NJSCA fellowship award. Recent publications include Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde, by Lyle Rexer, Light & Lens, Photography in the Digital Age, & Photographic Possibilities by Robert Hirsch, She has taught photography for over twenty years at New York University and the International Center for Photography in New York City.
Miska Draskoczy, Gowanus Wild
Miska Draskoczy aims to turn concepts of nature photography on their head by finding the beautiful in what most consider a man-made environmental catastrophe. The Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted waterways in the country and its surrounding neighborhood haveseen continuous industrial use since the 19th century. His vision is to capture a marriage of opposites; the organic in the industrial, green within blacks and grays, stillness and peace in urban chaos. He sees Gowanus Wild as an urban hiking manual, a continuation of generations of landscape photography, updated for our technological age. If only we adjust our perception of what is ‘nature’ and ‘wild’ around us, a fascinating wilderness can be found in the fringes of our decaying city where nature and chaos conspire to produce a new type of wild beauty.
(above: Moon Dock by Miska Draskoczy)
Bio: Miska Draskoczy’s photography has been exhibited in the US and abroad including solo shows at the Vermont Center for Photography and the Ground Floor Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and group shows including “The Fence at Photoville,” 2013. His work has been featured in the press by The New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, Time Out, PDN, Gizmodo, Featureshoot, Hyperallergic, Brokelyn and many others. He was recently named a Photolucida Critical Mass finalist. Miska’s visual arts career also includes co-founding a conceptual arts organization, directing surreal sci-fi shorts, writing and developing a Slamdance shortlisted horror feature, and creating a documentary web series. He also works as a director, editor, and animator through his production company snow23. He is an avid rock and ice climber.
Selected through our Portfolio Showcase Call for Work,
the gallery is also featuring portfolios by Robin Michals and Mark Lyon
Robin Michals, Castles Made of Sand
Castles Made of Sand is a series of photographs of the low-lying areas of the New York metropolitan region that are threatened by sea level rise. The unprotected built environments along the water’s edge are vulnerable. The tide will rise and wash them away: maybe sooner, maybe later. Hurricane Sandy was a harbinger of this reality and all of the locations shown in this series were damaged by that storm. Some like the South Street Seaport and the Back House Anglers fishing club have not yet been repaired. Castles Made of Sand uses the metaphor of the end of the day to signal the end of an era. The series also lives in the moment, enjoying the beauty of the color of the light as it changes each day after sunset.
(above: New Dorp Beach, Staten Island NY, April 9, 2014 by Robin Michals.)
Bio: Robin Michals is a photographer whose work focuses on the de-industrialized urban waterfront. Photographs from her Castles Made of Sand series have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Historical Society, Boston’s Copley Society, and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Her series Toxi City: Brooklyn’s Brownfields was exhibited at the Brooklyn Lyceum in 2009 with support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Puffin Foundation. Michaels teaches photography at New York City College of Technology. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Mark Lyon, Bay Views
In this ongoing series, Mark Lyon of Ulster County NY, examines landscapes through empty self-service car wash bays. The landscapes appear secluded as they are captured at night around the fluctuating cycles of street lights and traffic patterns. These familiar landscapes, viewed through the stark tunnel of an empty bay and the shifting balance of interior and exterior light, are transformed from the quotidian into unfamiliar and mysterious places.
(above: Defunct, Enfield CT by Mark Lyon.)
Bio: Mark Lyon’s photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States including Pulse NY, The Aperture Foundation; Exposure, Photographic Resource Center, Boston; The Center for Photography Woodstock (CPW); and Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco. He is a recipient of the Artist Fellowship Award CPW, a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and a 2011 Top 50 in Photolucida’s Critical Mass. Lyon’s work has appeared in numerous photography and culture publication including: The New York Times’ Lens; Photo District News (PDN) blog: Photo of the Day; DART: Design Arts Daily; Popular Photography and Chronogram Magazine (cover.)