Micah Cash

Micah Cash explores how landscapes and their social histories influence cultural geography. Themes of ownership, demarcation, and utilization are explored through painting and photography. Such investigations contemplate the shifting social, economic, architectural, and political forces that define particular landscapes, as well as the cultures that are dependent upon them. Micah earned his MFA in painting and photography from the University of Connecticut in 2014 and received BFA in painting and art history from the University of South Carolina. He has exhibited his work nationally, most recently in Atlanta, Georgia, Lubbock, Texas, and Ithaca, New York. He lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is a part-time lecturer at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Dangerous Waters Project Statement 

This project investigates the contemporary social impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). They explore the complex definitions of landscapes designed for both hydroelectric cultivation and recreation. In addition, these locations have become visual reminders of loss, population removal, and eminent domain. The sacrifices are privately internalized and the social benefits publicly celebrated.

TVA is the largest public provider of electricity in the United States. Established in 1933, it provides wholesale electricity throughout a seven state area while managing the navigable waters of the Tennessee River and its tributaries. The massive project and the modernization it promised the region came with a cost, and that cost was land. Overall, the government purchased 1.3 million acres of land, forcibly removed over 13,000 families, and relocated 20,000 graves.

This was not a one-time transaction. Social and cultural consequences continue to reverberate throughout the region. Ultimately, TVA has cultivated a particular ecosystem – one of quiet control and social welfare. It is a manicured landscape of power and ownership, utilitarian in practice and utopian in concept.

Triple Feature ||| FOUND

Garth Amundson & Pierre Gour

Amundson and Gour have artistically collaborated for the last 29 years. Their work explores the perceptions and politics surrounding the domestic sphere and identity. They use collage and photo-scanning techniques to speak metaphorically about social construction. Some of their work is literal collaboration, and at other times, they serve one another in a support role. They are a team who insist on producing challenging work that provokes a response.


Amundson holds an MFA from Syracuse University and Gour from the University of New Mexico. They both currently teach at Western Washington University in the Department of Art. Their work has been exhibited in South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and throughout North America. They have completed several residency programs, both independently and collaboratively; Sculpture Space in NY, Cimelice Castle near Prague, Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, Lademoen in Norway, and a Fulbright in Mexico. Recently they received a Rockefeller Foundation Residency Award and will be at The Bellagio Center in summer 2014.

Learn more about Garth&Pierre here

Garth is also coordinating the upcoming SPE-Northwest Regional Conference at WWU in Bellingham, WA on October 10, 11, &12, 2014.. The title for the conference is TRANSFIXED|TRANSMEDIA which is designed to address new definitions of photography.

The committee is looking for applications that push the boundaries of image making, image consumption, theory, and discourse in all contexts. The conference will highlight both Rodney Graham, as the keynote speaker, and Jess T. Dugan, as featured speaker.

Applications are open to virtually everything! Please pass the submission forms on to your friends and colleagues. The deadline is April 30, 2014.

https://www.spenational.org/resources/calls-for-entry/spenw-2014-conference-call-for-proposals

Project Statement 

The work itself is in keeping with the rest of our experiments with appropriation of vintage photography. In this context, we have paired turn-of-the-century studio portraits of two men into single images. Referencing the complexities of queer identity and the often convoluted morphing of two beings into a single relationship, these "couples" awkwardly hold space in an absurd and monstrous fashion. As if they were suspended trophies, the couples hang together in a strange and whimsical groupings.

Nick Schietromo

Nick Schietromo is a fine art photographer, residing in the Boston area. His work deals with various aspects of domesticity. He is a recent graduate from the New England Institute of Art and currently works as the Assistant to the Director of Gallery Kayafas in Boston, a framer at Panopticon Imaging in Rockland and an intern at the Nave Gallery in Somerville. Recent exhibitions and publications of his work include a solo show at The Nave Annex Gallery, the Flash Forward Festival 2013: Undergraduate Photography Now, Aint-Bad Magazine and Stampsy.

Project Statement 

While rummaging through shoeboxes and hand woven baskets at yard sales, I search for memories of domestic pasts via the anonymous photograph. These prized possessions, once intended to be stuck to refrigerators, thumbed through in albums with intimacy and care, are now displayed for all to pillage through in estate sales. Now void from their original context and stripped of identity, these objects exist with bent corners, faded coloring and patinas offering endless narratives. The more antique images I discover, I wonder what photographs from present day would look like in the future. Will we treat the digital decay of a photograph as fondly as a well-worn print corner or a faded and stained image in a frame? Through digital manipulation via binary code corruption of these found vernacular photographs, I am reassigning image value within a social archive. The new image creates a questioning of the societal shift from storing and exchanging analogue images to the storing and sharing of the digital files, and ones intra/interpersonal relationship to this imagery.