Kris Sanford

Kris Sanford grew up in southeast Michigan and received a BFA in photography from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She received her MFA in photography from Arizona State University, where she served as art editor for Hayden's Ferry Review. Her art explores intimate relationships, specifically queer desire, through the use of appropriated images and text.

Kris has exhibited her work nationally, including group exhibitions in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Miami, and New York. In 2010 she was awarded a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum and exhibited her work at the museum in May 2011. Between the Lines (no. 11) was selected by the Phoenix Public Art Program for the 2011 installment of the 7th Avenue Streetscape Panels. Her work is represented by Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston, Texas and Tilt Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Kris has taught photography classes at several institutions, including Washtenaw Community College, Arizona State University, and Glendale Community College. She is currently an assistant professor at Central Michigan University.

Artist Statement: Between the Lines

A 1954 diary that belonged to a grandfather I never met serves as the inspiration for and background in many of the photographs from Between the Lines. The figures that emerge from the pages, actual vintage photographs cut and photographed in camera, represent the memories contained in the text. Shallow focus reveals small details, while obscuring the larger story.

Relationships, real or imagined, are at the center of my work. I live vicariously through unknown strangers, creating stories from abandoned diaries, letters, and photographs. I use appropriated photographs for their seemingly innocent and unselfconscious nature, reinterpreting vintage snapshots to speak about the tension and complexity in my own relationships. My work raises questions about memory, truth, and representation in photography, often drawing attention to changing attitudes toward gay and lesbian relationships. My images are works of fiction, where I project my own dreams onto moments from the past.

Stephanie Shively

Stephanie Shively, a native New Yorker, earned her BFA in Photography from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Shively’s work is fueled by her personal experiences and innermost fears, which she transforms into a universal visual language through hand bound photo books. She has taught photography at the Santa Fe Boys & Girls Club in New Mexico, the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, Washington, and the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Shively is passionate about book arts, pushing the boundaries of photography, and nonprofit outreach that focuses on youth and the utilization of art as a mechanism for social change. She currently resides in Columbia, South Carolina with her husband and son, where she is working towards her MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina.

Artist statement: Motherload

Motherload is an exploration of the growth and overwhelming change that manifests when expecting. Pregnancy, despite being awkward, uncomfortable, and stressful, presents itself with certain expectations. We imagine the ideal couple entering this phase of life to be full of joy, smiling carelessly while creating a baby registry and caressing a lovely round belly. Any doubts, worries, leaky nipples, and urinary incontinence should be ignored and kept private. Pregnancy is certainly a beautiful experience, but it scales a complex emotional gamut that is not honestly represented in our culture. These photographs capture the complexity of my own pregnancy and its impact on my relationship with my husband, Tim.

In conjunction with Motherload is an edition of five hand-bound photo books housed in handmade clamshell boxes along with four beeswax covered pigment prints.

Jennifer B Thoreson

Jennifer B Thoreson is a young visual artist creating staged imagery that is both artistically stylized and meticulously crafted. Drawing inspirations from themes of faith and the intricacy of personal relationships, Jennifer is a dynamic and emotional illustrator of the human heart. With an innate ability to plumb the antique, the work is soulful; seeking the use of the forgotten or discarded, heavily symbolic, eerie and quiet.

Raised in a spiritual and conservative home in rural Texas, Jennifer grew up imaginative, curious, and experimental, and has used her upbringing in her intensely personal artwork to bring insight and awareness using heartfelt, acutely mapped personal experiences.

Jennifer is currently working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Alongside varied private portrait commissions, she is an international speaker and lecturer whose programs are sought after year after year by many professional public and private photographic organizations. Jennifer published her first monograph, Medic, in 2012. She has just completed her latest major body of work entitled Testament, a series of twelve images exploring love relationships and heavy burdens they sustain. Jennifer’s work has been a part of many group and solo exhibitions, and is represented by several major galleries across the country.

Artist Statement: Testament 

In my work, I revisit themes of human fragility, pain, and eventually, recovery. I am attracted to vulnerability, to peeling back a skin that reveals something precious, dark, and insistently tender. I am compelled by the moments where people are on an edge, barely laced together, befriending disaster, remembering something, or exposing something.

I am curious about how relationships survive, why they dissolve, how people love one another, and how such love is expressed. In this work, I am investigating heavy burdens and how we carry them. I am interested in the spiritual labor of bearing weight, submission, futileness, and persistence.

To create the work, I rented an empty house for a year, and transformed it into a makeshift sanctuary, a freighted space for constructing the photographs. I fabricated sculptural objects for each image, using materials such as wool, linen, clay, human hair, and beeswax. The materials borrow symbolic language from the Bible, and create alter-like, fleshy masses. The house reminds me very much of my childhood home, and provides a weighted, sentimental foundation for the images. Every object used in the meticulous staging of each scene references my childhood, and a time of spiritual emergence in my life. I imagine the house as a gateway, the space just before crossing over. The people in the photographs are in the final phase of bearing weight, moments away from finally laying it down. I am seeking the moment of relief, and relishing in the moments just before it occurs.

I like to know and feel the moment where people fall apart, and saturate my work in it. I want to push at a breaking point, and hold out hope for restoration. These photographs are representations of quiet, ultra-still, delicate moments of raw humanness; the phase just after a laboring, aching fall and at the point when renewal inevitably begins.

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

Jaime Johnson

Jaime Johnson grew up in Mississippi where the sounds of wild animals outside her window became her daily melody. Jaime received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in Imaging Arts and her MFA in Photography from Louisiana Tech University. Johnson was named a finalist for the 2014 Clarence John Laughlin award and her work has been shown nationally. Her series Untamed recently won the Grand Prize in the Maine Media Workshops international contest Character: Portraits and Stories that Reveal the Human Condition.

Untamed chronicles the intimate relationship of a feral woman and her surrounding natural environment. She collects the bones, branches, and flora of her world and treads with the animals, both dead and living. The cyanotype process shifts focus from potentially colorful landscapes and figures to patterns, textures, and the relationships of forms within the images. Discovery—both psychological and physical— is present and reveals each of us, whether human or animal, is a part of a shared experience. Untamed ultimately reflects upon the forms, the impermanence, and the interconnectedness of nature’s life.