Michelle Bablitz

Michelle Bablitz is an artist working predominately in the fields of photography and writing. Bablitz received her MFA degree in Imaging Arts & Sciences from Rochester Institute of Technology, and she has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions across the United States. Her photographic work largely encompasses the motifs of memory, loss and self-actualization. Bablitz resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she actively writes, photographs, and runs the artist agency SAINT LUCY Represents.

Artist Statement: I could go with you.

The series I could go with you. is the fragmented narrative of an internal struggle following a traumatic event. The series’ narrator is unable to come to terms with memories that are overwhelmingly painful. While attempting to navigate daily life and regain a sense of normalcy, she is afflicted with repressions from the past emerging in her present-day world. The images obscure the possibilities of the narrator’s future with a permanent state of loss in her past, collapsing the confines of time and space. Her fragile retrospective sentiments, as well as the fractured chronology, are examined through glass etchings.

I could go with you. is an investigation into how text and image work together to communicate a story, while challenging the credibility of memory. In many ways a photograph is eternally fictional and unattainable; one can never look upon an image and revisit the same scene or moment that was tangible only for a fraction of a second to the image-maker. A photograph transports its viewer to a scene that can be infinitely reinterpreted, but never truly revisited. However, once text is written, or etched onto glass as it is in this series, it has factual and constant points of entry that conjure unique images and reference points to each reader/viewer. Text and image communicate a disjointed narrative that mirrors how memory and trauma function in the human psyche when combined in this series.

Kate Wimer

Kate Wimer is a photographic artist whose roots begin in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has since found herself living in Utah, where she graduated with a BFA in studio art from Southern Utah University, and Savannah Georgia, where she graduated with an MFA in photography as a chair fellow at Savannah College of Art and Design. Her photographs have been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally. Wimer now resides with her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she continues to examine the way perceptions of place and home are constructed.

View more of her work here 

Project Statement 

Touchstones examines the ways in which people experience and construct notions of place in an increasingly transient society. In the midst of modern diaspora, any fixed or stable sense of locality is becoming increasingly blurred and destabilized. The growing speed, convenience, and affordability of mass transit and electronic communications have acted as catalysts for the evaporation of definitive territories and the carrying of history and cultures across borders. The landscapes of our past become touchstones–things to which we return and against which we compare, places from which we venture out. Through Touchstones, I have enjoyed the opportunity to examine the connections between two locations, Minnesota and Georgia, observing the stacking and translation of meaning between these two locales and the blurring of borders and boundaries of time and space between them. In this photographic series, photographs from my childhood home of Minnesota and current residence in Georgia flow together to construct a metaphor for a layered and decentered sense of place.

Photo Friday: Kathleen Hawkes

Kathleen Hawkes is an artist working in photography, drawing and digital image making.   She was born in Ithaca, New York. Hawkes holds a BFA from Cornell University and a MFA from the University of New Mexico. Hawkes spent 2012 on a Fulbright in Fiji working on a photography project.   She is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse.   

View more of Kathleen's work here 

Dusk Artist Statement

Feelings of attachment, belonging, estrangement and loss are essential to my process of art making.  Discarded pastries, broken dishes, mended clothing and worn sheets in my work are metaphorical stand-ins for home and the fragility of emotional attachment. I use the camera to embalm the beauty of what is passing.   I am drawn to the fraying edges, peeling wallpaper and minute cracks in the façade of the family home.  These details are symbolized in freezing passing cherry blossoms, submerging domestic linens in milk, and covering place settings in dust.  There is a fragile balance between presence and absence that I am trying to address, by capturing a tipping-point between wholeness and destruction.   By experimenting with commonplace things I confront the tenuous nature of the physical body and emotional vulnerability.

We play out our emotional dramas physically; we touch, smell, taste, scream, tear open, push away, and pull close. Through literal flatness I access the corporeal and attempt to bypass the representational.  I want the experience of my photographs to be immediate and visceral. I print so that the objects depicted are slightly larger than life to highlight the minutiae of the edges, bubbles, or residue.  I try to embed the experience of senses other than sight, such as the scent that lingers in a room, the slightest touch, certain auditory pitches, and the density of air. These encounters illustrate physical proximity yet express emotional distance.

Ann Mansolino

Ann Mansolino is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California. She received her bachelor's degree in English Literature from the University of California, Riverside and an MFA from Ohio State University. 

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, as well as in group exhibitions in Canada, England, Japan and Singapore. Recent solo exhibitions include the Hunt Gallery at Webster University in St. Louis and the photography gallery at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California. 

In recent years, she has made art, written about art, taught photography in Ohio, Michigan and California, worked in Ireland, taught English in Russia and taught writing and photography in Singapore. 

Her work can be found through Bruce Lurie Gallery in Culver City/Los Angeles

View more of Ann's work here: http://www.annmansolino.com/

Ashley Kauschinger: What draws you to creating symbolic narratives about memory and the self? What do you feel this act teaches you about yourself?

Ann Mansolino: I photograph in order to understand my own self and what it means to be human in the world. My images give visual, photographic form to lived internal experience, and function like a symbolic autobiography. They depict not what particular events looked like, but rather what they felt like, internally. Photographing in this way provides a means by which I can search for and locate meaning and give form to the emotional and psychological texture of the human experience. 

Narrative came naturally to me. I studied English literature in college – I pursued a graduate degree in art later – and believe literature influenced the way I create images. I like the way photographs can hint at a narrative, yet the rest of the story is necessarily left to the imagination of the viewer. It gives the viewer more room to navigate, and a larger place to find themselves and their experiences in the image.

Many of the images are self-portraits. I’ve photographed other people from time to time, yet even friends who have known me for years often can’t tell which images are actually me and which are not. I find this intriguing, as I really do see the entire body of work as an extended self-portrait, even when I’m not the one literally in the image. It is somehow always about self, even though it’s not always a literal representation of self. So I guess another thing I’ve learned is the flexibility and malleability of self, both as model for the camera and as concept.

AK: You have been working on the series Thresholds (in three parts) since 2000. What is it like working on a series for a long span of time and how do you feel the series has evolved? 

AM: I began creating these images when I was going through a difficult time in my life. Thus, early in the series, the photographic self is dissolving and diaphanous, reflecting my belief at that time that the photographs I made felt more real than I did. The images provided a needed sense of certainty and solidity at a time when I couldn’t find such things internally. That’s not where I am with my life anymore (fortunately), but the realization that photography can give voice to the parts of oneself and one’s life that are more abstract and difficult to articulate through other means was very powerful, and has led me to continue to work in a symbolic, poetic, narrative style since then.

In my more recent images, the uneasy interaction between the individual and the landscape has become more prominent, and ideas have shifted toward memory, regret, belonging, possibility, and the idea of home. The work has become lighter in tone and more playful, as well… reflecting the changes I’ve gone through, while still retaining continuity in style and approach. I believe that there’s value in continuing this exploration of identity indefinitely, across the span of my lifetime. I wonder how the photographs will evolve visually in 20 or 50 or more years, as I go through different phases of life, and as ideas of aging and mortality take on a different weight in my experience?

Already, though, the series has become so large that I have had to divide it into sections. The current three parts correspond to the different locations I’ve lived in while making these photographs: Ohio, Michigan, and California. Major changes in geography have resulted in differences in the look and feel of light and landscape, and thus provided natural groupings among the photographs.

AK: How do you conceptualize the constructions and symbols that you use in your images? Do you plan in detail or have a more visceral approach? 

AM: It’s really a mix. I do a lot of writing and drawing, and this process is essential in clarifying the ideas and symbols I’m thinking about. Sometimes, the images emerge fully formed. For instance, the images of the ladder emerging from the lake – I kept drawing that symbol over and over until I realized that I just had to go build myself a winding, curving ladder out of tree branches and put it in a lake to make photographs. The resulting images were very much what I had envisioned. Other times, I go to a place and start exploring it with the camera. I figure out how I fit into it, what other objects are needed in it. Often, even when I arrive at a location with a specific photographic plan, the final image is somewhat different, is something that evolves intuitively as I work.

AK: Your work deals with an ambiguous area of idea and emotion-- a place somewhere between understanding. Is that a difficult mind space to work in? How do you continue to stay in that place and not stray into the literal? 

AM: It’s strangely a comfortable place for me, a place I seek out. When understanding is poetic and not limited to the literal or immediate, it becomes such a rich place to explore. The risk of straying into the literal is very real, and is something I’ve encountered when my (or a model’s) face is clearly visible – the image then becomes about that specific person in that specific place, and loses its poetry, its universality. By leaving physical identity ambiguous within the image, it’s easier to avoid other forms of literal content as well. When the images hover comfortably between idea and emotion, the truths that are revealed transcend the individual experience and speak more broadly. That’s important, because in the end I do want the images to resonate with others: to be derived from my own experiences, but not about only me. After all, we all are trying to find our way through this world, and to understand what it all means, what matters; to articulate how we see ourselves in relation to our pasts, our feelings of belonging and its opposite, and our ideas of who we are and who we think we should be. And when I make a photograph that can touch on even a bit of that, I’m satisfied.