Nicole Akstein

Nicole Akstein was born and raised in Atlanta, GA in 1985 to Brazilian parents. She received her BFA in Photography in 2007 from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has freelanced for publications such as The Village Voice, Atlanta Magazine and Blender Magazine. Akstein's work has been exhibited in Georgia and New York. Her work explores ideas surrounding identity, gender, culture, and societal and social structures. Most images are shot with traditional black & white or color film, in 35mm and 120mm formats. In addition to photography, she has integrated video, light projection and mixed media installations into her work.

Akstein is currently based in Athens, GA, where she received her Masters of Art Education and Certificate in Nonprofit Management from the University of Georgia in 2014. She has taught art to students in pre-K through high school at various schools & community centers in Georgia, Brazil and India. She is the Arts Outreach Coordinator at the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art and art instructor at the Lyndon House Arts Center, while also working on projects and freelance opportunities.

Artist Statement: Mother, Mãe

Mother, Mãe, in its title alone, exposes its subject matter -- my mother. Our deep-seeded Brazilian roots pair the English term with the Portuguese translation, respectively. The work bears the weight of the overwhelming list of roles that women willingly and, often inadvertently, inhabit. The first role in which I abruptly came to know her, was none other than "mother," the center of my universe. As my link to the world, it is no surprise that I have been photographing her since I first picked up a camera. She is my most natural point of origin, stemming from the visceral. However, the works represent a woman, a state of mind, a spirit, and the passing of time. They are less biographical and more indicative towards notions of age, beauty, relationships, and the human condition.

Initially driven to convey the ambiguous nature of such roles, I became intrigued by the cultural forces that influence and shape the complex relationship women have with their mothers. In my experience, facing one's mother can be like facing a mirror, and these images can also be interpreted as self-portraits. I am confronting my beliefs, strength and femininity with hers. I am measuring these attributes to a lineage of women before and after her as well. I portray a woman who is trying to accept the body she inherited; one she passed on to me along with her image of herself. 

As our relationship evolved, the focus shifted towards exploring the relationship women have with themselves. Photographing her is an attempt to inhabit memories and re-create experiences, to transform them in order to somehow better understand their importance. The outcome consists of improvised, yet highly staged images, eluding any suggestion of a true reality and deliberately objectifying my mother. Images depicting the familiar landscape of a lake, swimming pool or bathtub are juxtaposed with scenes alluding to the bewilderment of death and rebirth.

The images weave a nonlinear narrative that invites and questions her reality. Among the dynamics taking place, beauty and fantasy are often undercut by loneliness, aging, and dissatisfaction. As an observer, I interpret her experiences in order to somehow justify my own. My mother wasn't always willing to play the role of a collaborative agent, and I don't blame her. The camera was an unwanted presence not only exposing herself to me, but exposing her to herself. The viewer is introduced to a woman through the eyes of her daughter, prompting one's own self-reflection.

Mother, Mãe is the result of a culmination of experiences, collaboration, conversations, arguments, and admiration for someone who informed my understanding of the world through her own. After years of sustained projections of her hopes and dreams placed upon me, one might infer that this body of work represents my response to living under a mother's thumb. However, it is my intention that this work empathize with her as a woman embracing her many roles, while confronting the notion that all may not be resolved in the end.

  

Jessica Somers

Jessica Somers is a photographer specializing in historic photographic techniques and self-portraiture. Jessica has been in love with photography for most of her life. She was exposed to the act of picture making through her grandfather, an avid amateur photographer, and in the family bathroom-turned-darkroom after sunset. Here, her parents would allow her to witness actual magic as she stood over the chemical trays watching an image appear where only a simple white sheet of paper was before. As a kid she received a Kodak disc camera and became addicted to the act of expressing her individual view of the world from the 4 foot high perspective of a seven year old. Her height has since increased but her addiction continues.

Jessica's work has been exhibited nationally and is represented by the Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston, TX. Her research on alternative processes and select photographs are published in the 3rd edition of The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James to be released in 2015. She is a recipient of the 2012 Artist Fellowship Award by the The Connecticut Office of the Arts. Jessica currently teaches photography throughout Connecticut and at the Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston.

Artist Statement: Paper House

When I entered into marriage and domestic life I experienced an intersection between personal choices and societal expectations. Suddenly the traditional aspects of nesting I had previously deemed objectionable became desirable. I both loved and loathed the idea of myself as a sort of servant in my home.

Through the self-portrait series Paper House, I investigate which of my actions are genuine desires and which actions are inherited from societal expectations common to previous generations of American women. These photographs reference my struggles, my reflections and my fears through visual metaphor. While I do not wish to take for granted my healthy relationship and stable home, I acknowledge the challenge of maintaining my personal identity amid the expectations that come with such gifts. I accept that even between the strongest of partners an unexpected earthquake can come along and knock the house down. But an earthquake can never undo the effort to sustain that which you love and endure.

Aspen Hochhalter

Aspen Hochhalter is an Associate Professor of Art and the Photography Area Coordinator in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work has been exhibited nationally and examines contemporary photographic themes as well as the crossover between digital technology and historic photographic processes.

Artist Statement: The 92/20 Self-portrait Series 

92/20 is a collection of 92 wet plate collodion ambrotype self-portraits created in 20 days during the summer of 2011. These very personal self-portraits speak to the construction and deconstruction of feminine identity. It was also an experiment in returning to not only the roots of photographic expression by utilizing one of the earliest photographic processes, but also a return to the bare essentials of photographing: a reliance on self, silver and the sun. Yet, since wet plate collodions have to be coated, exposed and developed in a matter of minutes--all while the light sensitive photographic emulsion is still wet - this nineteenth century process has an intriguing parallel to the instant gratification of our current digital age.

The images themselves are elusive sketches of a “self,” playing to the camera, flowing in and out of poses and clichés--juxtaposed with unexpected flaws, irregularities, missing pieces and unsettling cuts and tears. I revel in the mistakes, the odd textures and unexpected chemical smears and veils that emerge on the photograph--most of which serendipitously occur over an eye or mouth--chance deletions and desecrations of the form that create an intense emotional content for which I couldn’t have planned. With the 92 plates, I am now reconstructing what I deconstructed and fragmented with the camera, creating odd approximations of a whole. A sometimes unsettling reconstruction of self emerges: dismantled, fragmented and then stitched back together.

Zachary McCauley

from the series Sometimes This Can Be Difficult 

Zachary McCauley's work primarily explores ideas of identity, family, ritual, and interpretation through photography, video, audio, and performance. He received his BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in photography from Jacksonville State University in 2011. His work has been exhibited across the nationally and published in national magazines such as Aint-Bad Magazine and PDNedu. Most recently Zachary was honored to receive the grand prize in the Fine Art/Personal Work category in the 12th annual PDNedu Student Photography Competition. Zachary lives in Ruston, LA with his wife Hannah Cooper McCauley, also a photographer. Both are pursuing an MFA in Photography at Louisiana Tech University.


                                  
                               

Artist Statement for still images: Sometimes This Can Be Difficult

Growing up in the American South, I have always been surrounded by a notion that the region is one of magic, pride, family unity, and rich history. My own experiences with the region have been less than this ideal. The poverty of my youth and an immersion in drug culture during my late teens and early twenties have granted me access to a side of the South that is not often praised - one where magic is replaced by hot languor, beauty is found in squalid homes and damp alleys, and litter becomes a landmark to the unseen and the forgotten.

I find that the often overlooked or banal moments in everyday life are what connect the various segments of the South as a culture and as a region. While each partition of the landscape is home to local customs, it is the ever present, everyday nothing of the background that ties people and the region together.

This collection of images represents the camaraderie and love that I share with displaced or forgotten spaces, moments, and objects found during my recent period of uprootedness within the South from one state, both geographically and emotionally, to another. I hope to find hints of who I am as an individual, as well as within Southern culture through these explorations, but sometimes this can be difficult.

  Video Piece, "NONE SHALL MOVE WITHOUT THE OTHER" from Zachary McCauley on Vimeo.


  
  Video Piece, "Repeater" from Zachary McCauley on Vimeo.

Laura Beth Reese

Laura Beth Reese is a Boston-based artist and curator. She was born in Iowa and raised in the Northeastern United States – sometimes in New Jersey and sometimes in Massachusetts. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in 2009 at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA and went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts in 2014 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reese’s work has been exhibited around the United States, most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photograph and the New Art Center, where she co-curated the recent exhibition I Want To Smell Your Hair. Laura Beth Reese uses photography as a catalyst for intimacy – taking pictures of others as a way of reaching out and connecting. Her projects are often autobiographical: she photographs people that occupy her life in one way or another. Reese photographs with a large format camera and color film.

Artist Statement: Home Study 

Home Study is one component that addresses my status as an adopted child, focusing on my identity and the ways in which it has been shaped by my adopted family and the spaces in which I spent my childhood. The photographs were made in New Jersey, where I grew up and where my parents currently reside, and Utah, where my formally estranged sister lives. With many of the photographs, I worked in collaboration with both my mother and my sister, so that we could each have a hand in the process of representing the impact of adoption on our family. Our conversations about our family and the problems inherent in adoption strongly affected what I chose to photograph. This collaboration furthered the exploration of my relationships with my mother and my sister, so that the process of taking the photographs became as important as the photographs themselves. The images speak to the ways in which adoption has simultaneously aided in forming my strong relationships with certain family members and created conflict and unease in my relationships with others. Ultimately, the photographs speak to identity, family, and womanhood through the representation of my own personal narrative. They are the result of my constant search for my origins as well as an investigation into the ways that specific people and spaces have or have not shaped my identity.

Heather Evans Smith

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Heather Evans Smith is an award winning fine art and conceptual portrait photographer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work captures both the everyday and the whimsical, telling stories of women and struggle, reality and the surreal. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions, magazines, literary journals and online publications. Recently, she was chosen as a winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n and one of the Critical Mass Top 50 of 2014.

Artist Statements

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Seen Not Heard

For the past few years I have been creating images to express the emotions of motherhood. My daughter has never been included in those images. But as she has grown from a baby into a force of nature all her own, I was drawn to pull her into my world of conceptual photography and explore our relationship during a time when emotions of love, stress and confusion are high.

Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage “To Be Seen and Not Heard”, a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger, path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also exists a distance inherent between two different individuals.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

The Heart and The Heavy

Life is full of stories – some deeply personal and specific, others universally relatable. My story is beautiful and complicated and bittersweet and hard. Life is just that way. So are photographs.

The birth of my daughter was life-changing, but not in the way I expected. Though there has been no greater joy for me, the responsibility of another life has proven to be at times a heavy load. Thinking about this in a literal sense, I imagined a heavy home on my shoulders, yet held tightly with love – a burden and a joy, a challenge and a reprieve. This became the first image in the series The Heart and the Heavy.

From there the stories evolved, just as my life has. The genesis of an image comes from moments of life, like a still from an old movie. Movement and pain and the simple joys of being alive are frozen in time – a study of fictional worlds based in reality. Compelled to shoot these stories, I am haunted for days and months until it is released in an image. Telling someone’s tale in a world not quite like our own.

Interview

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

Ashley Kauschinger: The Heart and The Heavy and Seen Not Heard both explore emotions associated with your daughter. How did these two bodies of work come about and develop? Did one grow out of the other? How are they connected and different?

Heather Evans Smith: At the end of 2011 an image kept entering my thoughts of a woman in a field, house strapped to her back, holding it tightly with love yet with so much weight. That vision became the first image in the series The Heart and The Heavy. My daughter at that time was two and I was experiencing some of the most powerful emotions that I had ever felt: love, connection, stress, heaviness. For the rest of the series I explored different emotions through images of myself and others. After two years of working on the series I was ready to approach something different. My first inclination was to take some of my previous The Heart and The Heavy ideas and try them with a child. I wanted to see how the image changed with a simple change of age. That idea morphed into using my daughter as a model and exploring the parent/child relationship through conceptual imagery.

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

AK: What brings you inspiration?

HES: I am inspired by many things: a song lyric, a vintage item of clothing, an emotion, daily life, an old movie. I keep my mind open to new ideas and immediately jot them down. Sometimes I will shoot these images right away and at times it may take years for the timing to be right.

From the series, Seen Not Heard 

AK: How do you go about constructing narratives within your images?

HES: Some ideas are specific at the time of the shoot and others tend to reveal multiple layers after the photograph has gone out into the world. I tend to think about the idea or emotion I want to express first and then how I can show that visually in the photograph. This can also happen in reverse order. When I stumbled upon a vintage hand-painted puppet theatre, I had no idea what I would use it for. That prop started the brainstorming that later became the image, The Roles We Play.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

AK: What technical approach do you take in your work? 

HES: In The Heart and The Heavy series I wanted the images to look as real as possible, so everything is there at the time of the shoot. For the image Collide, instead of photoshopping the beach balls in later, I had 4 friends throwing balls at different heights in the background. Photoshop is definitely involved to a degree but all the details are originally in the frame for a realistic look. Most of the images are shot at 16mm for a cinematic feel.

For the series Seen Not Heard the approach is simpler. I shoot in the darker rooms of my house with open windows to create a more painterly light. Since the images are of my daughter, the series is more personal and shot closer with a 35mm prime lens.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy

AK: How do you think about the balance of life and being an artist?

HES: It is difficult being a full-time mom and artist. I don’t get to go out and shoot on a whim. Though limited, my time dedicated to my art is used wisely. Luckily with Seen Not Heard I am not searching for a certain sliver of time to shoot with a model or in a specific location, for my model and location is within my home. This isn’t always going to be the case, however, it has been nice to bring my daughter into my world of photography.

From the series, The Heart and The Heavy