Private Visions/
Public Spaces
November 11 to December 10, 2023
Ellen Feldman
Cassandra Goldwater
Moira Barrett
Karen Davis
Ellen Feldman
Strange Encounter, pigment print by Ellen Feldman
Cassandra Goldwater
Contemplating Circles, pigment print by Cassandra Goldwater
Moira Barrett
Untitled7 from Losing Focus, pigment print by Moira Barrett
Karen Davis
CK IT from Warren Street Through the Looking-Glass, pigment print by Karen Davis
About the Artists & Their Work
Ellen Feldman: My Private Paris
Eyes on the Wall, c-print by Ellen Feldman
Ellen Feldman’s photographic roots are in street photography. But “My Private Paris” began for Feldman in the 1960s with the early films of Jean-Luc Godard, particularly Vivre sa vie. His films—with their cool tone— influence her search for odd compositional elements: complications of line, scale, perspective, and figure-to-ground relationships.
In Feldman’s annual three-month stays in Paris, she feels a curious ease when she’s out photographing — an ease tinged with equal levels of anxiety and excitement, wandering through areas little frequented by tourists, seeking the energy and grit of urban life. Camera in hand, she takes in the wall art of the Butte Aux Cailles, the multi-ethnic inhabitants of Belleville, and walks along sections of the Seine far from Notre Dame. When she spots her subject(s), her eyes, hands, and mind become one. As she circles in, usually unnoticed, she aims to fill the frame, layering human interactions, narratives, color, and geometry.
Bio
Ellen Feldman is a fine arts photographer, whose work includes street photography and long-term projects. Her work reflects her film studies background—the primacy of physical gesture, bold color, and a sense of narrative.
Feldman has had solo exhibits at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson, NY, and the French Cultural Center, Boston, MA. Juried shows include Julia Margaret Cameron Awards (Honorable Mention), NYC4PA (Juror Selection), New York Photo Curator (Honorable Mention), PhotoPlace Gallery, Photographic Resource Center, Praxis Gallery, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, and more.
She created the photobook “We Who March: Photographs and Reflections on the Women’s March, January 21, 2017,” with contributions from thirty photographers. Other books include a photo/comic book: “The Dancer as the Invisible Girl,” and street photographs: “Les Mystères de Paris / Paris Mysteries” and “A Week in Prague: Wall People / Street People.”
Feldman was for many years Photography Editor of the Women’s Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University.
Cassandra Goldwater: Line and Texture
Anxiety, pigment print by Cassandra Goldwater
An ongoing theme in Cassandra Goldwater’s work is a close look at surface, texture, and line. Lines cross and make texture everywhere – in reflections, in corners, plants, and industrial equipment. She is drawn to these visual layers and the surprises that emerge. Hers is a contemplative process: observe, frame, and capture an image.
“I am fascinated with how, in the making of the image, something new arises and I’m always prepared to be surprised by what is revealed.” A lotus bud filled with eyes, or is it green olives and pimentos? A patch of ice that looks sewn onto the surface with darning or decorative stitches. The soft layering of a young robin’s feathers might be finely painted lines of a newborn’s hair.
Bio
Cassandra Goldwater uses photography to wrestle with current events and histories both personal and political. While many of her images combine found objects, she is also drawn to the interplay of the natural environment with her imagination.
Her photographs have been shown in the Curated Fridge, Griffin Museum Photography Atelier exhibitions and Members’ Show. Davis Orton Gallery, SE Center for Photography, RI Center for Photographic Art, Bedford MA Library and the Arts League of Lowell.
Ms. Goldwater has studied photography at the DeCordova Museum, the New England School of Photography, and the New Hampshire Institute of Arts and Science. Workshops include the Santa Fe Workshop with Cig Harvey, the North Country Workshops with Sean Kernan.
Goldwater teaches composition at UMass Lowell. Her commentary on the photographic work of Jennette Williams and Jellen van Meene appeared in the Women’s Review of Books. A lifelong New Englander, she currently resides in the small city of Lowell, Massachusetts where it is rumored a renaissance is in the making.
Moira Barrett: Losing Focus
Losing Focus #4 by Moira Barrett
Moira Barrett observes that in an increasingly chaotic world, it is hard to keep your head above water — or your head down to avoid conflict. Maintaining course seems difficult and at times impossible.
“My head sometimes spins from the disorder and discord that surrounds me, and I find myself trying to be reasonable when reason and questions have become the enemy. Nothing is clear anymore; we are in a constant state of flux. I am awash in a swirl of feelings and emotions. I try to create order, but I can only record the confusion. Finding beauty in that confusion is my way of coping.”
Barrett’s 4-second exposures do not simply pin down an instant but record the surrounding moments — what comes before and what remains after. Edges become blurred, truth remains elusive, and yet perhaps there is still light in the world.
Bio
Moira Barrett is a fine art photographer based in New England. She uses traditional photography and photo-transfer techniques, video, and construction to address issues of self, memory, relationships, and aging.
Her photographs and mixed media have been featured in numerous exhibitions and galleries, including the Cambridge Art Association’s BLUE, RED, Northeast Prize, and 2019 Open Photo Exhibit; the Davis-Orton Gallery of Hudson, NY; the NAVE Gallery of Somerville, MA; the Susan Maasch Fine Art Gallery of Portland, ME; the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Newburyport Art Assoc. and the Boston Young Contemporaries juried show. Dana Hoey has reviewed her work in the Women’s Review of Books.
Originally from Rochester NY, Moira has a BA in Art from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design. Moira is married to Johanna Schulman, a retired financial planner and artist, lives in Cambridge, MA, and is the parent of Annie Barrett, Assistant Coach for Women’s basketball at NYU.
Karen Davis Hudson Canto:
Warren Street Through the Looking-Glass
Winged Goddess from Warren Street Through the Looking Glass, pigment print by Karen Davis
In the city …. everything comes out of the human gut. It has the new and old, the beautiful, the ugly, the juxtaposition of it all. You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city. It is an immensely human subject.
Berenice Abbott
As Karen Davis thinks of key episodes in her life, it is location, where she has lived—her home, street, neighborhood, city—that frames her past.
Hudson Cantos is a personal portrait of her home, Hudson NY. Under 6000 in population, two square miles in area, it is eminently walkable. For over fourteen years, she has meandered—camera in hand—along its streets and alleys.
Each Canto, a collection of photographs and a zine, while thematically different, reflects what she loves about Hudson- the diversity of the built environment and its multiplicity of class, culture, and identity.
Bio
Karen Davis’s work is featured at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and in the collections of CPW Kingston NY; Lishui Museum of Photography (China); Houghton Rare Books Library, Harvard University, and corporate and private collections.
Davis is a Critical Mass finalist and recipient of the CPW Artists Fellowship Award. Her word/image book, Still Stepping: A Family Portrait, was published in 2020. A second edition (2022) is available at The Spotty Dog Bookstore in Hudson, Inquiring Mind Bookstore in Saugerties NY, and the Davis Orton gallery and website. Her photographs, photobooks and artist books have appeared in solo and featured exhibits throughout the country.
Davis is curator/co-founder of Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson NY, now in its fourteenth year, exhibiting photography, mixed-media, and photobooks. She has taught photo-based and word and image art courses at several colleges in the Boston MA area and presently teaches Portfolio Development & Marketing and The Self-Published Photobook Workshop online for the Griffin Museum of Photography. She is a member of the Women Photographers Collective of the Mid-Hudson Valley.
Counterpoints
October 7 to November 5, 2023
Kay Kenny
Ruth Wetzel
Carla Shapiro
Karen Davis
Kay Kenny
The Razor’s Edge of Romance
Kay Kenny, Razor’s Edge of Romance 3, 10″x 10″
Ruth Wetzel
Flowers Noir
Ruth Wetzel, Mimosa Bayridge
Carla Shapiro
The Sand that Makes the Pearl
Carla Shapiro, Untitled 23, 20×30, Untitled 12, 20×30
Karen Davis
Hudson Cantos: Bushes, Vines, Flowers, Weeds
Karen Davis, Untitled diptych, pp97-98,, 12″x 30″
Karen Davis, Untitled diptych, pp5-6, 12″x 30″
About the Artists
Kay Kenny
The Razor’s Edge of Romance
Kay Kenny, Razor’s Edge of Romance 6, 10″x 10″
The Razor’s Edge of Romance is an original story of persuasion: dreams spun from false trails, futile hopes, unfounded convictions. A woman travels through these dreams only to recognize the futility of her search for a perfect reality.
In many ways, this story mirrors the current polarization of our times and our sources for political/cultural news that relies more and more upon the rumors and “alternative facts” of the internet as we lay down a confused and false reality of our view of the world.
Kenny was inspired by the techniques used in the 1961 black and white avant-garde film, Last Year a Marienbad, where time is compressed, and realities confused. In the end however, the woman in this story realizes the futility of living by rumors and hearsay.
Bio
Kay Kenny is an award-winning photographer, mixed media artist, writer, and teacher. A three-time recipient of NJSCA fellowship award, she has exhibited in shows nationally and internationall. Solo shows include, most recently, Griffin Museum of Photography, Casa Columbo Museum, Jersey City, NJ; Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ.Her work has appeared in group shows in New York City, Medellin, Columbia; Taipei, Taiwan; Lubbock, Texas.
Kenny’s many awards include Historical Processes Exhibit Soho Photo, 3rd Place award; Margaret Cameron Photography Award, Honorable Mention 2019; Arthur Griffin Legacy Award, Griffin Museum, 2009; Lucie Awards, Honorable Mention in Fine Arts Photography.
Kenny writes art criticism and articles on the visual arts for arts magazines. She has taught photography for over twenty-five years at New York University, and the International Center of Photography in New York City Lucie Awards. She received a BFA from Syracuse University, MA from Rutgers University, and MFA from Syracuse University (all in Visual Arts).
Ruth Wetzel
Flowers Noir
Kay Kenny, Mimosa Saugerties
In Flowers Noir, Ruth Wetzel’s photographs blur lines of space, gravity, and emotion. Mimosa trees, also known as the Pink Silk tree, have feathery flowers of mostly stamen. They seem to dance and whisper in the wind. Here, they have floated off the tree and have entered a magenta space. The place is a disorienting context. The tree as marker of ornamentation, places the flower. The titles refer to locations Wetzel has seen Mimosa trees in suburban glory.
Bio
Ruth Wetzel uses photography to bring viewers an intimate look at waterscapes. Recent solo shows include Davis-Orton Gallery in Hudson, NY and The Arsenal Gallery at Central Park. Group shows include Millepiani Exhibition Space, Rome Italy, and Foley Gallery, NY, NY. Ruth has received fellowships from Baer Art Center, Iceland, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Women’s Studio Workshop and New York State Council on the Arts. She has a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art, and a B.S. in Design from Buffalo State College. Her work has been shown and collected nationally and internationally.
Carla Shapiro
The Sand that Makes the Pearl
by Carla Shapiro, 20×30″
“Depression is the sand that makes the pearl”
Joni Mitchell
Carla Shapiro has always expressed herself through photography. Her imagery explores loss and longing, memory and nostalgia, womanhood and aging. She has now turned to a somewhat forbidden topic, her personal experience of depression.
” It runs beneath, above, around, and through me. It’s like drowning while knowing how to swim.” It is an inner voice that torments me. It tells me who I am and who I will never be. It shouts and whispers my unworthiness. It hides sometimes, and sometimes goes quiet. But its shadow lurks, foretelling its eventual return. It is what has been given to me and I live with it. I sing and dance with it. I dream and sleep with it.”
Bio
Carla Shapiro is a photographer and educator based in upstate New York. Her photographic projects explore loss and longing, memory and nostalgia, womanhood, aging, and the human condition.
Carla has received numerous awards including two photography fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a Golden Light Award from The Maine Photographic Workshops and a Pratt Development Fund to travel to Madagascar to photograph the Baobab trees. She has had multiple residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and The Ucross Foundation and has exhibited her work in solo and group shows across the country.
Carla is a Professor in the Graduate Department at Pratt Institute and at Pace University. She received a BFA from Syracuse University, then attended ICP and began her career as an artist.
Karen Davis
Hudson Canto: Bushes, Vines, Flowers, Weeds
Zine-Canto: Bushes, Vines, Flowers, Weeds 190 pages, by Karen Davis
In the city …. everything comes out of the human gut. It has the new and old, the beautiful, the ugly, the juxtaposition of it all. You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city. It is an immensely human subject.
Berenice Abbott
As Karen Davis thinks of key episodes in her life, it is location, where she has lived—her home, street, neighborhood, city—her place, that frames her past.
Hudson Cantos is a personal portrait of her home, Hudson NY. Under 6000 in population, two square miles in area, it is eminently walkable. For over fourteen years, she has meandered—camera in hand—along its streets and alleys.
Each Canto, in a series of photographs and a zine, while thematically different, reflects what she loves about Hudson- the diversity of the built environment and its multiplicity of class, culture, and identity.
Bio
Karen Davis’s work is featured at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and in the collections of CPW Kingston NY; Lishui Museum of Photography (China); Houghton Rare Books Library, Harvard University, and corporate and private collections.
Davis is a Critical Mass finalist and recipient of the CPW Artists Fellowship Award. Her word/image book, Still Stepping: A Family Portrait, was published in 2020. A second edition (2022) is available at The Spotty Dog Bookstore in Hudson, Inquiring Mind Bookstore in Saugerties NY, and the Davis Orton gallery and website. Her photographs, photobooks and artist books have appeared in solo and featured exhibits throughout the country.
Davis is curator/co-founder of Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson NY, now in its fourteenth year, exhibiting photography, mixed-media, and photobooks. She has taught photo-based and word and image art courses at several colleges in the Boston MA area and presently teaches Portfolio Development & Marketing and The Self-Published Photobook Workshop online for the Griffin Museum of Photography. She is a member of the Women Photographers Collective of the Mid-Hudson Valley.
News about
2024 PHOTOBOOK EXHIBITION
The Fourteenth Annual Photobook Show
is moving to the Griffin Museum of Photography.
Stay tuned for more information regarding
submission, deadlines, and dates of the show at the Griffin.
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