Ryan Parra

Ryan Parra is a photography based artist with a primary focus on edible, medicinal, and psychoactive plants growing in the Tempe/Phoenix valley. He earned his BFA from the University of Oregon in 2012, and MFA at Arizona State University in 2016.

Artist Statement: Vivarium

As pharmacology continues to advance, I believe it is important to have a sophisticated understanding of the plants from where it derived and knowledge of their traditional uses. My work is influenced by the rich history and current practices of ethno-botany (such as traditional shamanic practices), the history of still life paintings and plant illustrations, the exploration of plants as a system of knowledge, and the organization of agriculture for the purpose of sustaining the masses.

Urban areas continue to thrive and expand at a rapid rate, resulting in negative effects in biodiversity throughout the lands around them. As scientists are seeing a decline in biodiversity in wilderness areas, they are often finding the opposite trend in highly populated urban areas. This rise and fall of biodiversity is one of many reasons for my interest in still lifes of edible, medicinal, and psychoactive plants growing in the Tempe/Phoenix valley, as well as my focus on plants out in their natural environment. With this in mind, I hope to shed light on the rich variety and the importance of plants growing near and far from our homes. By incorporating styles from still life paintings throughout art history while also including descriptions of each plant's traditional uses, I want to remind viewers of the role plants have played in the exploration of knowledge and well being for thousands of years.

The title, Vivarium, reflects this interest in our unique relationship with nature, and sets the theme of curiosity, containment, and control. Vivarium, meaning place of life, is an enclosed space with plants or animals for observation or research purposes. For me, this act of concealing fragments of nature expresses a sense of power one has over something, much like science with nature, while also expressing great affection and love towards that same thing. It is in this binary friction that fundamental characteristics at the root of our own nature are revealed, as are issues evident in the modern perspective of the natural world.

Lindsey Beal

Lindsey Beal is a photo-based artist in Providence, Rhode Island where she teaches at Rhode Island College. She has an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Iowa and a Certificate in Book Arts at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. She is represented by Boston's Panopticon Gallery.

Her work combines historical & contemporary women’s lives and feminism with historical photographic processes. She is interested in the photograph as object and often includes sculpture, papermaking and artist books into her work.

Her work has been shown at national museums, galleries and universities and is included in various public & private collections. She recently earned an Honorable Mention for Center Forward 2014 at the Center for Fine Art Photography. She was a Finalist at the 87th Annual International Print Competition at The Print Center and received an Honorable Mention for emerging American photographers by the Magenta Foundation. Her work can be found at lindseybeal.net.

Artist Statement: Transmission

A bacterial sexually transmitted infection is a living, growing, mutating thing that exists within the human body. The act of transmission is often sexy; yet what is transmitted is menacing. The bacterial STIs before you (BV, Chlamydia, Trichomonas, Gonorrhea and Syphilis) can be silent for women and have little to no symptoms for men: they reveal themselves mainly through medical tests. Without testing, the cycle continues: without noticeable symptoms, no treatments are received; without treatments, the infections are unknowingly passed to others. Though mostly silent, all of these infections have potentially catastrophic side effects like pelvic inflammatory disease, joint disease, meningitis, sterility and fatal pregnancies. Although we should have eradicated these long ago, bacterial STIs continue to exist. Frighteningly, they are beginning to mutate and become drug resistant; gonorrhea specifically has outgrown our current treatments. Due to the recession, many non-profit clinics in which these STIs could be identified and treated have closed. What once seemed like a scary yet treatable nuisance or temporary problem is becoming a major public-health concern.

Transmission’s images are created by using open-source imagery from the Center for Disease Control. The images were altered, and then converted into digital negatives, which were used to print the cyanotypes. The prints are embedded in resin within Petri dishes. Each STI is represented in various images and whose information and prevention can be read about in the accompanying artist book.

 

Michael Sherwin

Using the mediums of photography, video and installation, Michael Sherwin’s art reflects on the experience of observing nature through the lenses of science, popular culture and history. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work, and has been exhibited widely, including recent shows at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York, SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, the Clay Center for Arts and Sciences in Charleston, WV, and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta, GA. Reviews and reproductions of his work have been featured in Art Papers magazine, Oxford American magazine, Don’t Take Pictures magazine and Aint-Bad Magazine, among others. He has been invited to present his work at universities and conferences across the nation, including the 2011 Society for Photographic Education National Conference in Atlanta, GA. Sherwin earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon in 2004, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University in 1999. Currently, Michael Sherwin is an Associate Professor of Photography and Intermedia in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University. He is also the founder and lead instructor for WVU’s Jackson Hole Photography Workshop and an active and participating member of the Society for Photographic Education.

Vanishing Points Statement 

I grew up in the quiet suburbs outside Cincinnati, Ohio in a mostly conservative, white, catholic community where nearly all of my friends and neighbors attended church on Sundays. Although my parents had grown up in catholic households, it was in their independence that they begun to question their relationship to the church. On Sundays, my father would often take my younger brother and I on long wandering walks in the dense forests of the Ohio River valley. These early formative experiences have led to a life long exploration of the mystery and beauty of our natural world. They have also left me with looming philosophical questions about the tenants of Western religion and its views on the sanctity of the land.

In the name of Manifest Destiny, westerners expanded across America claiming the land was theirs by divine right. Modernization and civilization swept across the continent “improving” the country and eradicating entire native cultures in its path. In my most recent project, Vanishing Points, I explore the ancestry of the American landscape, and reflect upon traditional Western Anglo American views of nature, wilderness, ownership and spirituality. The project was inspired by the battle over the use of land that is now the Suncrest Town Center in Morgantown, WV. The Town Center was developed on a 2,000 year-old sacred indigenous burial ground and village site less than a mile from my house. I am fascinated by this simultaneous presence and absence in the landscape, the seen and unseen.

Combining extensive research of historical archives, maps and contemporary satellite imagery, as well as direct collaboration with archaeologists, historians and scholars I have been able to locate and photograph numerous significant sites of Native American history in the regional area. The sites I choose to visit and photograph are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual locations where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, I reflect on the monuments our modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our modern civilization reveals about our time on Earth.

One of the allures in visiting these sites is the possibility to reach back in time; to imagine and experience what the land must have been like hundreds and thousands of years ago. I am often reminded of the experiences I had as a child, where the presence of something ancient, mysterious, and much larger than myself still exists. However, nearly every direction you point the camera in today’s world, evidence of our modern civilization intrudes. It is this duality of experience that I seek to portray in the Vanishing Points project. The photographs in this series recognize the historical significance of an otherwise banal landscape, connecting a mysterious and ancient past with the familiar present.

Jennifer Georgescu

Jennifer Georgescu's work describes instinctual aspects of humanity correlating to and differing from societal structuring. With a background in painting and photographic arts, she utilizes medium format film photography, installation, and digital technology. Her projects analyze dualisms in language, relationships, mythologies and control. "I often search for the balance that exists in between these dichotomies. This is how I view humanity; always teetering on the line between fiction and reality, domination and submissiveness, self and other."

After obtaining a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design in 2008, Georgescu was awarded a year long residency at Vanderbilt University’s "Gallery F." She has received numerous awards from Artist Portfolio Magazine, the Camera Obscura Journal of Literature and Photography and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award. Her works have recently been exhibited in the Masur Museum of Art, the Detroit Museum of New Art, and PhotoCenter NW.

Project Statement: Star Gazers

I wish I could believe that something was out there waiting for me in the cosmos. I find the thought of forever incapacitating. Then I think of the alternative; of being nothing ever again. We all have a self proclaimed importance that renders our being obsolete, impossible. This is part of what makes us human. We hold the idea of our importance despite our insignificance and mortality.

I long for a time, somewhere in the past, when it was thought that all information was just out of reach and all we had to do was find it. I feel that in present time, the more information we know, the more we realize that we’ll never know it all. We now have a vastly expanding wealth of information at our fingertips, yet we are no closer to “knowing” the most important answers.

The most wonderful idea I can think of, the thing that truly comforts me, is the possibility of time being warped beyond our current perception. I find comfort in the idea of parallel universes; where little holes allow for one world to briefly experience the next. When you make a decision in one world, an alternate decision would be made in the next, and so on. This idea has always allowed me to think that when I am gone in one world, I may continue in the next.

Star Gazers addresses the things that are hard to think about (i.e. death, mortality, insignificance) through imagination and narrative easy to be confronted with. Fiction and awe weave together antique imagery, scientific imaging, and medium format film photography to tell a farfetched tale that is factually possible. This is a story where worlds can communicate, where past and present can connect, and the cosmos contain meaning.

Irby Pace

Irby Pace creates his art by reverse engineering everyday common objects and devices. This is driven from his childhood where he would take things apart, then he would figure out how they worked and put them back together or found other possibilities for the devices. He sees the artistic possibilities in all of the things around him and he uses this to his advantage. Irby Pace was born in Odessa, Texas. In 2005 he moved to Lubbock, Texas to attended Texas Tech University where he received his BFA in Photography in 2008. He received his MFA from The University of North Texas in 2012.

His work has been featured in Wired Magazine, The Huffington Post, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and The Dallas Observer among many other websites, blogs and online magazines. Pace’s work was featured on the cover of the November 2013 issue of The Dallas Observer. From 2012 – 2013 he was a member of 500x, Texas’ oldest, largest artist run cooperative gallery. Pace is an Adjunct Professor at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, El Centro Community College in Downtown Dallas and The Art Institute of Ft. Worth.

Irby Pace is represented by Galleri Urbane in Dallas, Texas.
To acquire Irby Pace photography contact Galleri Urbane

Artist Statement: Idle Voids—Pop!

In artistic compositions, negative space usually takes on a secondary role to the primary subject matter. Some believe that this void represents everything that is lacking in human experience. Writer Mark Levy, PhD., states that this is an experience of Western culture, and that the void can be “directly experienced in the gap between thoughts.” I am finding these empty spaces and making them tangible through photography.

The floating phenomenons in my photographs fill the void of the urban and natural landscapes. I alter the real physical space with real floating colorful clouds of smoke and allow nature to dictate the shape and duration. This allows me to capture the momentary glimpse of the vacant space. By using crude and readily available resources, I am experimenting with the tension of upward or outward movement against the downward force of gravity, creating the illusion of gravity defiance.