Harrison Walker

Harrison Walker was born in Huntsville, AL where he received his BFA in studio art at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Walker received his MFA in Photography at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, PA where he currently lives. Walker is interested in imagery that references the otherworldly and the perception of time and their relation to the physical and chemical reactions in printmaking and photographic techniques. Recently, Walker has shown at Soho Photo, New York, NY; City Hall, Philadelphia, PA; American University, Washington, D.C.; and Pop Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

 

Artist Statement: Portals

The only way to truly understand is through experience.

I create prints and/as objects that embody the physical layering of time through tactile processes that evoke feelings of lived experiences. By working intuitively through the process of search and discovery, I employ the visual alchemy of printmaking, drawing, and photographic materials to create forms that evoke an experiential and emotional viewing—a sense of awe; a sense of the sublime; a sense of absence and loss.

My work explores connections with time, memory, and history through imagery that references the otherworldly and the non-present. I am interested in the way we perceive and consider time throughout the span of our life. How do we think about, navigate, manipulate, and represent time? Our experiences and memories affect how we think about the past, present, and future; they affect the decisions we make and the associations we have with visual imagery.

Portals is an investigation of chemistry made of fifty-nine variations of a repeated form – showing similarities and differences of color and surface through printmaking and photographic techniques. Similar to a Rorschach test, Portals is intended to explore how the viewer perceives variations in texture, surface, color, image, and time. Most of the prints in this series are stable and will last many years, however, there are certain variations that will continue to change over the course of time.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

 

Elizabeth Fleming

Elizabeth Fleming (b. 1975 in Philadelphia, PA) is a photographer whose primary artistic focus explores memory, a sense of longing and mystery within the everyday, and how nostalgia informs perceptions of the world. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, earning both her BFA and MFA in photography. Her work has been exhibited widely, including shows at Hous Projects in New York City, The Photographic Resource Center in Boston and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Awards include an Honorable Mention in Blurb’s Photography.Book.Now competition, an Artists’ ShowCase Award from The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO, and second place in Photo Center NW’s 15th annual juried show in Seattle. Her images have been published in Lens on Life: Documenting Your World Through Photography, Fraction magazine, and Foam Magazine’s Book of Beds, among others. She lives with her husband, commercial photographer James Worrell, and their two daughters Edie (11) and June (8) in Maplewood, NJ.

Artist Statement

Buried on Her 90th Birthday focuses on the house and land in Iowa where my grandparents lived for 61 years. When I was younger our visits from the East Coast to the Midwest were tinged with a feeling of wonder—to me the surroundings were a museum of sorts, which gave me both a feeling of comfort and constancy while also inspiring a particular sadness in the knowledge that nothing can last forever. Because of this I formed a strong sense of nostalgia and a fascination with the significance of homes and objects, concepts that have found their way into much of my artistic practice over time.

While I had taken photographs of their house for years, it wasn’t until my grandfather died in 2008 that my image-making became that much more centered around the idea of material things as totems, along with the notion that what people leave behind might be able to give a deeper glimpse into who they were while alive. When my grandmother died in 2012 these concepts came even more fully to the fore as my family and I gathered to go through and divide up her possessions. I intensively documented what she and my grandfather had accumulated over a lifetime and the spaces they had inhabited, all the while thinking about my lineage: the items passed down through generations, the sense of history in so much of what she and my grandfather kept, and how the seemingly unimportant becomes precious and even fascinating following death.

Four months after she passed away my grandmother was buried on what would have been her 90th birthday. I understood then that in many ways this is a series I always knew I would make. From the beginning I was looking ahead to the day when my grandparents would no longer be there to add their presence to the rooms they had lived in for so many years, and ultimately making these images has been my attempt to hold on something that is now, inevitably, ephemeral.

Michael Sherwin

Using the mediums of photography, video and installation, Michael Sherwin’s art reflects on the experience of observing nature through the lenses of science, popular culture and history. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work, and has been exhibited widely, including recent shows at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York, SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, the Clay Center for Arts and Sciences in Charleston, WV, and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta, GA. Reviews and reproductions of his work have been featured in Art Papers magazine, Oxford American magazine, Don’t Take Pictures magazine and Aint-Bad Magazine, among others. He has been invited to present his work at universities and conferences across the nation, including the 2011 Society for Photographic Education National Conference in Atlanta, GA. Sherwin earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon in 2004, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently, Michael Sherwin is an Associate Professor of Photography and Intermedia in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University. He is also the founder and lead instructor for WVU’s Jackson Hole Photography Workshop and an active and participating member of the Society for Photographic Education.

Vanishing Points Statement 

I grew up in the quiet suburbs outside Cincinnati, Ohio in a mostly conservative, white, catholic community where nearly all of my friends and neighbors attended church on Sundays. Although my parents had grown up in catholic households, it was in their independence that they begun to question their relationship to the church. On Sundays, my father would often take my younger brother and I on long wandering walks in the dense forests of the Ohio River valley. These early formative experiences have led to a life long exploration of the mystery and beauty of our natural world. They have also left me with looming philosophical questions about the tenants of Western religion and its views on the sanctity of the land.

In the name of Manifest Destiny, westerners expanded across America claiming the land was theirs by divine right. Modernization and civilization swept across the continent “improving” the country and eradicating entire native cultures in its path. In my most recent project, Vanishing Points, I explore the ancestry of the American landscape, and reflect upon traditional Western Anglo American views of nature, wilderness, ownership and spirituality. The project was inspired by the battle over the use of land that is now the Suncrest Town Center in Morgantown, WV. The Town Center was developed on a 2,000 year-old sacred indigenous burial ground and village site less than a mile from my house. I am fascinated by this simultaneous presence and absence in the landscape, the seen and unseen.

Combining extensive research of historical archives, maps and contemporary satellite imagery, as well as direct collaboration with archaeologists, historians and scholars I have been able to locate and photograph numerous significant sites of Native American history in the regional area. The sites I choose to visit and photograph are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual locations where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, I reflect on the monuments our modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our modern civilization reveals about our time on Earth.

One of the allures in visiting these sites is the possibility to reach back in time; to imagine and experience what the land must have been like hundreds and thousands of years ago. I am often reminded of the experiences I had as a child, where the presence of something ancient, mysterious, and much larger than myself still exists. However, nearly every direction you point the camera in today’s world, evidence of our modern civilization intrudes. It is this duality of experience that I seek to portray in the Vanishing Points project. The photographs in this series recognize the historical significance of an otherwise banal landscape, connecting a mysterious and ancient past with the familiar present.

Brenton Hamilton

Brenton Hamilton is a artist working in Maine and leading courses at Maine Media Workshops where he has taught for over two decades. Brenton is a photography historian and a practicing artist in several media. He was educated at Savannah College of Art and Design, MFA 1992.

Hamilton has led classes at Maine Media Workshops for 22 years and his specialty areas include the history of photography, B&W darkroom craft and the historic processes. Brenton lectures widely both in Maine and nationally about contemporary issues in photography, its history and other subject area interests within the medium and contemporary trends. He is also on the adjunct faculty at The Center of Alternative Processes in New York City. Brenton is a contributing writer and president of Obscura, founded in 2009, a non profit organization devoted to the progress of youth education in photography and books.

His work is represented at TILT Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona and in Maine at Susan Maasch Fine Art. Hamilton’s photographs are held in permanent collections at the Farnsworth Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, University of New England Permanent Collection and many significant private collections nationally. His first monograph was published by Obscura Press in 2010: The Blue Poet Dreams.

Statement 

Drawn to concepts of time and invention - Brenton builds small meta worlds to contemplate and experience. Via still life and collage; intimate spaces where time is suspended and rearranged is the manner in which Hamilton re jiggers the world and makes a private space for his viewers. Employing often the strange deep blue depth of the cyanotype or recently the odd spectrum of collodion on black glass. Hamilton's new and old worlds collide inviting the viewer to new possibilities.

Ashley Kauschinger: Let’s begin by having you tell us a bit about yourself, and your passions.

Brenton Hamilton: I am a Maine artist and now live and work here - I also grew up here spending alot of my early boyhood on an island with my parents. Which was influential - and a particular way to grow up. Without phones, electricity only for certain times of the day, we had rythems of movement - we didn't have a car for a long time for example. The horizon - which any island person would agree is a destination, everything was always: "over there". So, the horizon line was something that I looked at in early work that I did with the large camera in Georgia.

My own interests are a deep study of history which is a large influence upon my work so I may be drawn to books and archives - o.k. full disclosure I am !! American and European cultural history and of course art & photography have great stories that sustain me.......I have a large collection of primarily 18th C. Spanish antiques and I photograph the objects among other things. I find the objects magical and full of animation and and mysterious gesture. Many of those images are here in our interview. The antiques and my creative work merge. Fencing is also a passion - that's sword work. I fence foil & sabre. Ive studied the history of the practice of dueling with some depth.

How does a body of work come together for you, from start to finish?

The research that I do about culture and the objects that I'm drawn to have a wonderful rapport together. I get ideas from the research - I want to respond and invent that atmosphere. So, via collage and cyanotype or lately still life practice and these small set ups that I build, I make these things for the camera. Its a fantasy of course, an invention. I build something - and photograph it.

What environment do you create for yourself in your studio?

The rooms that I work in are a ramshackle tumble of books and papers, notes with ideas and things that I want to remember and also light. The room has great light. The objects are on pedestals, stacks of carpets and lean against one another. Creating moments of chance and interesting configurations. I also know that I don't work constantly. Things build up and then I have to make them and do my camera practice and printmaking.

How do you think about marrying form and content in your work?

I have always been drawn to the expressive potential of the 19th C historic processes - because of patina (paper surface) and the physical work involved in the making of the images. The black glass ambrotytpes and the collodion process has the physicality to it that I enjoy and feel "involved" in when doing it. The black ground of glass support is for the image to rise out of and is also exhilarating. That's actually similar to my years with cyanotype - a deep blue ground was a 'space' for my story to be told - and the image or figure would rise out of the deep color......it still gets me every time.

Who are your Photo Heroes?

Oh, that's a tough one for a historian, Ashley......Wm. Talbot and the French calotypists, Anna Atkins - But I also respond to and admire so much contemporary work right now such as Alison Rossiter, Matthew Brandt and especially Mariah Robertson. The materiality of photographs - and things that are light sensitive.

How does participating in sharing your knowledge through teaching contribute to your work? 

I love the classroom - its dynamic and its often challenging. Its a huge influence - and I get to talk about others work but its reciprocal because were doing the same thing/the same mission. That is: moving work and ideas forward.

Do you feel it inspires you? 

It really does......

Tell us about your participation with Obscura, a non-profit organization that
supports the arts and arts education through publishing, scholarships, and grants.

This is a great small org. - with a terrific mission. To assist youth with creative experiences in the medium, to publish good work in book form or in essay form on our web site. So, we work on raising funds via book sales and direct reach, give scholarships or materials support.

What initiatives are you working on? What is the best way for the photo community to help?

Our aim this year is another student scholarship for a short workshop experience in photography. It is a non profit - so we need to build the treasury to help these kids out. So, get in touch, donate if you can - everything matters even a little. The book purchases go directly to the work we do. But we also love good work and like to publish serious essays on the medium on our site. We published "Black Apple" by Thatcher Cook a while back and its doing well. We are all very proud of the book and our work.

How do you find balance between your artist practice, teaching and being the
president of Obscura?

Good question - its all the same though - participating in photography in a myriad of ways gets me to work everyday ! Helping young students, sustaining my own art practice and gallery work and the energy of the classroom all make a difference in my life.