Rachel Jump

Rachel Jump's black and white work explores themes addressing ideas of home, belonging, memory, and absence, and have been exhibited throughout the United States. Rachel is represented by Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL, and had her first major solo exhibition in November of 2015. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA PH’14), where she received the Harry Koorejian Memorial Scholarship in 2013 and the Haining Family Scholarship in 2012. Her photographs are a part of the RISD Museum Special Collections, where she was also a visiting artist in conjunction with the exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, in 2012. Rachel has taught at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts and Maine Media Workshops + College and spent the last year working as a studio assistant for the photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Rachel lives and works in the Chicago area.

Rachel's solo exhibition, Origins, is currently open until December 24, 2015 at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL. She will be giving an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition on December 19, 2015 from 4:00-5:00pm. Check it out if you are in the area!

Artist Statement: Origins 

The core of my photographic practice stems from a place of pure empathy- a desire to share my story within the collective human experience. My visual trajectory has always centered on the disparate nature of my own family, and my desire to reconnect us.

For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin. Photography provided a way in which I could eternalize these fleeting moments, a fiction entangled by my truth. As a way to cope with these feelings of isolation, I created a narrative hoping to connect these places and reunite my family. Through this shared experience, my family and I appear to search for one another within the various environments that divided us. As a result of our efforts to find solace and intimacy, I conjured a myth of a home; a sanctuary where my loved ones and I could finally belong.

My photographs are relics of loss; traces of a family that I tried to piece back together.

Andi Schreiber

Andi Schreiber is a fine art and documentary photographer. A lifelong New Yorker, Andi was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island and currently lives in suburban Westchester County with her husband and two sons. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan and was a photojournalist in the Boston area before returning to New York to work as a magazine and newspaper picture editor. Her photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications and were recently featured in a solo exhibition at Lilith Studio Gallery in Ravenna, Italy.

Artist Statement: Drift

We crave stillness, but move about aimlessly. Once a place of relative calm and routine, our home teeters in a state of fluid negotiation. All of the players are in flux. It's a study in contrasts: manly muscle and sagging skin, lustrous hair and graying beards, water and wine, devotion and drift.

By midlife, we've begun to accept our own inevitable deterioration. Mortality looms, our time here precious. We lose parts of ourselves, in much the same way as we surely lose the people who surround us – through death, through life, through drift.

Our children evolve, their circles ever expanding. They spill forth in every direction, breaking boundaries while we remain. They will never need us as they once did, when life was new. Like water, smoke, and shadow, the force of circumstance buoys us along. There is darkness here. We drift.

See the book Drift here

Ayumi Tanaka

Ayumi Tanaka is a Japanese-born artist, living and working in New York City. Tanaka has been working on collage work by using found images from private snapshot and the Internet to explore theme of memories. She received a BFA from Osaka University of Arts in Japan in 2002, and studied at International Center of Photography in 2010. Her work has been shown internationally at exhibitions including United Photo Industries Gallery in New York, Tokyo Institute of Photography in Tokyo Japan, 25 CPW Gallery in New York, Pictura Gallery in Bloomington IN, Dumbo Arts Festival 2011 in NY, and LOOK3 festival of the Photographs 2012 in Charlottesville VA. Her work has been published at "PHat Photo (Tokyo, Japan), Lettre International (Beriln, Germany), LensCulture, GUP Magazine, Featureshoot. Tanaka was awarded International Center of Photography Director Fellowship in 2010 (New York), Grand prix at Tokyo International Photography Competition 2013 (Tokyo, New York), Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 and Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Award 2014.

Artist Statement: Hide and Seek 

I have been working on a collage project by photographing three-dimensionally layered negatives within dioramas. My approach, with the use of fairytales to tell personal stories, is to try to silhouette the remembrance and oblivescence of my own childhood. As exposing and hiding the emotional component of my childhood and where I am today, I try to seek out the depth of memories through working with shadows of mementos. I photograph light and shadows, which are created by multiple layers of negatives within a three-dimensional diorama that function as device, to create tableaux. The stories are comprised of private snap shots, and appropriate everyday objects from the Internet as symbols, as well as the photographs that I take for collage component.

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.