OCTOBER, 2020 - MARCH, 2021
The new "Portfolio Platform" provides the focus of a streamlined online presence, providing the opportunity for photographers to showcase portfolios of photographic work prominently online. The portfolios are available for patrons of the gallery to view online, learn about the photographers and their work through the images, biographies and artist statements, and have the opportunity to purchase photographs. Six artists are featured with each portfolio consistsing of 12 - 20 images.
PORTFOLIO PLATFORM - 2020/2021
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Heather Brand, Meadville, PA;
Barbara Diener, Chicago, IL;
Douglas Hill, Los Angeles, CA;
Stephen Jess, Brooklyn, NY;
Christopher Jordan, Tuscaloosa, AL;
Ned Walthall, Lawrenceville, NJ.
Barbara Diener
"The Rocket's Red Glare"
"The Rocket's Red Glare" traces the history of instrumental rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, whose story embodies Barbara Diener's ongoing interest in the complicated German heritage surrounding WWII. A NAZI turned NASA scientist von Braun's life represents as much contradicition as his groundbreaking rockets do, which were used as missiles and spacecrafts alike.
In 1932 Werhner von Braun went to work for the German army, which fell under National Socialist rule the following year. Accounts of when he joined the NAZI party vary but by 1937 he was the technical director of the Army Rocket Center in Peenemunde where the V2 rocket (Vengeance Weapon 2) was created and tested. After the war, when von Braun was brought to the U.S. under the controversial Operation Paperclip, a government initiative to secure and extract German scientists, his talents were called upon by the U.S. military. He settled in Huntsville, AL with members of his original rocket team, where they eventually developed the Saturn V and put the first man on the moon.
To create some of the works for "The Rocket's Red Glare" Diener has superimposed archival images found in the Wernher von Braun Archive in Huntsville, AL with her own photographs.The first date indicates the year of the archival photograph, the second year in which she made her photograph and the composite. With these pieces Barbara is literally compressing time and place.
Rather than presenting a complete view of this complex part of German-American history —classified for decades — Barbara is posing questions, looking at the way that history is passed on through generations, and how facts are distorted, embellished or undermined.
Born in 1982 in Germany, Barbara Diener received her Bachelor of Fine Art Degree in Photography from the California College of the Arts, and her Master of Fine Art Degree in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago, IL.
Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Hyde Park, IL; Alibi Fine Art, Chicago, Il; David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago, IL; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; Invisible Dog Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Lillstreet Art Center, Chicago, IL; Riverside Art Center, Chicago, IL; Pingyao Photo Festival, China; The Arcade, Chicago, IL; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Diener's photographs are part of several private and institutional collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Diener has participated in several artist residency programs including the Fields Project in Oregon, IL, ACRE in Steuben, WI and HATCH Projects through the Chicago Artist Coalition. She is a winner of Flash Forward 2013, the recipient of a Follett Fellowship at Columbia College Chicago and was awarded the Albert P. Weisman Award in 2012 and 2013. In 2015, 2017, and 2020 she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Events.
Diener is the Collection Manager in the Department of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In June, 2018 Daylight Books published her body of work "Phantom Power".
Images in the Portfolio are Archival Inkjet Prints, 13" X 19", 15" X 21" framed, $1,050 each,
and 27.5" X 25", 42.5 X 30" framed, $1,200 each.
Stephen Jess
Despite the ever present sense of isolation, a familiar energy begins to appear as New Yorkers adapt to life in the 'new normal'. Shot in the NYC Subway over 10 days in July, candid street portraiture pays poetic witness to New Yorkers grit and glamour as the city transitions from Phase Three into Phase Four.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Stephen Jess is a New York based photographer and film editor. Editorial work has included National and Global advertising campaigns and award winning documentary feature films. Jess continues to explore the strength of diversity in New York City through candid street photography and intimate portraiture.
All images in the portfolio are Archival Inkjet Prints, 8" X 12", 2020, $500 each.
Christopher Jordan
These pictures situate a mystical narrative along the edge of suburbia, a seemingly bland and uneventful place. Conceptually, these pictures depict thresholds between physical, geographical, and psychological states of being. Characters wander this liminal, metaphorical landscape, observing the luminous events around them, all the while reflecting on their interior condition. The exact nature of the events is unknown; an imaginative leap is required to resolve initial perceptions, perhaps leading to further reflection and contemplation for the viewer. This project goes further to establish the presence of an omniscient observer, who's persistent gaze from behind the windows runs through all the images, perhaps serving as a metaphor for our own contemplative capacity. The images are photographs of 20" X 30" tabletop dioramas constructed from photographs, cut paper and vellum. These dioramas are then lit in the studio and re-photographed.
Christopher Jordan is a photographic artist and teacher, living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. He is on the faculty at the University of Alabama, overseeing the photography program. He earned his MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004. Projects find him creating imagery of both real and imaginary places, working with traditional, digital and experimental photographic approaches as required. He is most interested in how photographic imagery can serve as vehicle for reflection, memory and meditation. Jordan's work has appeared in the journal Diffusion: Unconventional Photography; the photography blogzine Lenscratch; the national traveling photography exhibition, Spinning Yarns, and various exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.
All images in the portfolio are Archival Inkjet Prints, 16" X 24", $800 each.
Ned Walthall
"Grand Central Terminal"
The Main Concourse of Grand Central Terminal is a massive, deconstructed Stonehenge, which makes you conscious of time on two scales; clock time, always present on the clock atop the famous kiosk, and seasonal time, of which few making their way across the Main Concourse seem aware. In Grand Central, those two senses of time collide, in the urgency that drives people to get where they are going and the slow, almost indiscernible movement of sunlight across the floor.
Despite their appearance, the Grand Central photographs are never staged. Ned Walthall is aware that he frames them in a kind of light and color that pulls the subject out of the moment, to remind himself that none of us are completely ordinary or have lives that can be accurately summed up as an interminable race to catch a train.
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the
centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading animbus
of gold-color'd light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head with-
out its nimbus of gold-color'd light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman
it streams, effulgently flowing forever.
— Walt Whitman, "To You"
In Grand Central, if there is no cloud cover outside and the sun is in the right position in the sky, no head appears without its "nimbus of gold-color'd light". No head without its own nimbus of light, no individual who is not the protagonist of his or her own narrative. "The living presence and beauty of a glorious and luminous light has no enemies", writes Emmet Gowin. "Our shortcomings forgotten; we are all for a moment its children". Light, like so many other things, can be extraordinarily democratic if you simply decide to let it be.
Ned Walthall is a photographer based in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He received his MFA from the Institute of Art and Design at New England College (formerly the New Hampshire Institute of Art). He has shown work at the New England School of Photography in Boston, Massachusetts; The Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, Kansas; and Gallery 14 in Hopewell, New Jersey, where he did a one-person show entitled, "After Audobon: The Herons of San Antonio".
All images in the portfolio are Digital Archival Prints, 13" X 19", $500 each.
Heather Brand
Brand is interested in the collection, cultivation, and recreation of the natural world. The human compulsion to re-contextualize and reframe that which we deem natural is a consistent theme in her work. The friction caused by the gap between the reality we know to be true and the one we buy into for the sake of education or entertainment is made visible by a line of demarcation. Heather aims to make visible the moment of friction caused by these two eerily similar worlds nearly making contact.
Heather Brand is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania and received her MFA in Visual Studies from the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. Most recently Brand's work has been included in the traveling exhibition "Depictions of Living" at the Art Pavillion in London and in the exhibition "Isolation-Living Apart" at the Millepiani Exhibition Space in Rome.
All images in the portfolio are Archival Inkjet Prints, 36" X 24", 2018/2019, $375 each.
Douglas Hill
"Separation Anxiety"
The series, "Separation Anxiety" has grown out of the sensation that what Douglas Hill encounters in front of his camera is not accessible to him, that he will never be able to get any closer than halfway there, an impossible distance to cross. It's not clear whether this is a fault of his or represents a shift in the world that surrounds him. These images are his attempt to deal with the parallel fears of alienation and intimacy. Hill did not set out with the intention of locating that which made him feel separate from his environment, but rather stumbled across patterns in his everyday work that increasingly pointed to his sense of alienation. He had been so sure his photographic endeavors were innocuous, and only in the editing process learned that the world he inhabited was slowly drifting out of his reach, now on the other side of a barrier he can't define, let alone see.
All images in the portfolio are Archival Inkjet Prints, 17" X 22", 2020, $500 each.