Carla Shapiro, Untitled 23, 20×30, Untitled 12, 20×30

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.

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.