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.

Chris Maliga

Chris Maliga is a photographer currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions nationally, most recently at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, Nave Gallery in Somerville, Massachusetts, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, among others. He serves as the Studio Manager for Photography at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Maliga has also taught courses and workshops in photography throughout New England. He has printed black-and-white photographs for Barbara Bosworth and Mike Mandel. Maliga holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an AA in Photography from the University of Maine at Augusta.

Artist Statement: Dominion

Nature has served as a refuge for me throughout my life, alluring an inquiring mind with its at once tranquil and ever-fluctuating state. For my photographs, I search for secluded locations that lack the tell-tale signs of human habitation. I am as much interested in witnessing the undisturbed passing of time in these spaces as I am in exploring my own desire to be a part of the movements within them. In these places, I am rendered aware of my own fragility. Through performative interactions with the terrain and the adverse elements, I find myself immersed in a sense of both freedom and vulnerability. There are cycles at work within the natural world that seem to us to be endless, but only because they have carried on for so much longer than we have existed. Night passes to day, snow turns to water, vegetation blooms and then shrivels. For the short time in which the shutter is open, my body is a part of these rituals. To me, these vanishing seconds are a welcome source of rejuvenation. By committing that moment in time to the silver of film and paper, it achieves a permanence that neither I nor the weathered ground will ever truly know.

Jamie Carayiannis

Jamie Carayiannis is a fine art photographer from Northern Virginia. Primarily interested in the landscape, her work addresses the complex relationships that humans develop with their environments. More recently she has been interested in exploring her own energy use and its connection to coal extraction processes. Jamie graduated from James Madison University with a BFA in Studio Art and minor in Spanish and earned her MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art & Design. She currently resides in Northern Virginia and is an Adjunct Photography Instructor at the Art Institute of Washington - Dulles.

Power Statement

The photographic body of work, Power, is an examination of energy use. Specifically, Power explores coal and the industry’s use of mountaintop removal mining processes. This series of photographs contextualizes my own energy consumption and considers how communities in the Southwest region of my home state of Virginia have been negatively affected. Further, Power addresses concerns regarding the photograph’s ability to serve as a viable method of scientific measurement while examining the relationship between performance and photographic documentation. I have conducted and documented a series of small-scale experiments and performances that aim to demonstrate the magnitude of mountaintop removal mining’s impact. In an effort to provide the viewer with a greater sense of place, Power also includes a series of landscape images of the affected region. Together, the two sets of images speak to and inform one another. I am simultaneously critical of and complicit in the issue of energy consumption.