Ray Ewing

Ray Ewing is a photographer and artist from the island of Martha's Vineyard. Ray received a BFA in photography from Maine College of Art in Portland in 2012, he is currently completing an MFA in studio art at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Ray has worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer, educator and an exhibiting artist. As a photojournalist, Ray has received multiple awards for his work with the Martha's Vineyard Gazette. As an artist, Ray has been a part of multiple group exhibitions as well as a solo show entitled Visual Stimulus.

Artist Statement: Realistic Worlds

Realistic Worlds is an exploration of the human need to design our reality to satisfy our desires. I study this general human trait by describing spaces which adhere to a specifically American definition of fantasy as being guided by self-evident power and excess. The structures of the tourism and entertainment industries are houses of worship for the American religion of escapism. We use a thin, glossy veneer of designed reality to engage in obviously absurd, yet culturally accepted sanctuaries of make-believe.

Abbey Hepner

Abbey Hepner investigates the human relationship with landscape and technology. She considers issues related to population growth, man-made disasters, as well as the complex and often contradictory roles surrounding technological progress. She addresses psychological motivations existing in the gray area between political extremes and morally complex subjects. Her work illuminates the increasingly common use of health as a currency. Hepner holds bachelor’s degrees in Art and Psychology from the University of Utah and is currently in her final year of an MFA program in photography at the University of New Mexico.

Interview conducted by: Laura Addison A curator at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and previously at the New Mexico Museum of Art. She is also an independent writer on contemporary art and photography.

Laura Addison: Through several of her recent projects, Abbey Hepner has interrogated the nuclear industry, whether photographing decommissioned plants in Germany or making environmental portraits of an anime-like “nuclear mascot” in Japan in the months following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant disaster. She subsequently journeyed to various sites in the United States that send their nuclear waste to southern New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and printed those photographs as uranotypes, a 19th-century uranium-salt-based technology that tests viewers’ comfort zones while viewing landscape imagery that carries the threat of contamination. In her final series, Control Room, Hepner gained access to the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant and the surrounding rural Georgia community to examine the nuclear industry’s “renaissance” in spite of stories of disaster and contamination.

It’s no accident that you chose to pursue your graduate studies in New Mexico: birthplace of the atomic bomb, home of the first atomic bomb detonation at Trinity Site, and final resting place for the nuclear industry’s waste at WIPP. Can you talk about your decision to journey to some of the significant sites of nuclear history, among them New Mexico and Japan? What have you learned about place and landscape from these encounters?

Abbey Hepner: I created my first project on the topic of nuclear energy in Germany at the height of the decommissioning of nuclear power plants across the country. I was interested in what the landscape becomes after the towers fall and the buildings become inoperable. The industrial landscape is suddenly rendered impotent, but the land often remains dangerous for decades. Creating this work in Germany opened my eyes to many problems with nuclear energy that I wasn’t aware of before. It made me conscious of how misleading many U.S. news sources are, especially in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown. That shift in awareness inspired me to investigate various facets of the nuclear energy industry.

In 2013, I volunteered in the Japanese disaster zone that was left from the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace Program in the 1950’s helped build Japan’s nuclear energy industry and so I was really interested in how my own culture as an American had influenced Japan. Nuclear propaganda in the U.S., with cartoons such as A is for Atom or Astro Boy, always seemed strange to me. Just as bizarre, I discovered that each of Japan’s nuclear plants had their own cute mascot characters. This led me to create my own fictional nuclear mascot that I photographed in different situations that referenced current nuclear concerns in Japan. In an act of public art intervention, I had an image of the character screened on a digital billboard in Shibuya Crossing, the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. In this photograph the character points out at the crowd of onlookers and then back at himself, raising a question about the role of media and propaganda in manmade disasters.

After coming back from Japan, I moved to New Mexico for graduate school. I left a place fresh with wounds from the nuclear industry and moved to a place filled with scars from it. I had gained a heightened sense of discomfort while in Japan. Many people are concerned about radiation but it’s extremely taboo to talk about it. I never knew if the land around me, or the food I ate was contaminated. I constantly discounted my own fears because I was another pair of hands to help and ultimately I could return home to a place I believed was safe. Newly immersed in the dry desert of the southwest, I started to question this illusion of safety. I realized that I had spent my entire life unknowingly living near nuclear sites that were filled with radioactive waste.

I love the work of artists like David Maisel, who takes beautiful aerial photographs of toxic landscapes. They are hauntingly alluring but they always suggested to me a certain otherness. In their grandiose scale and the nature in which they are made, they remained at a safe distance. What I feared was not the toxicity that appeared visibly contained within the borders of a photograph, but the invisible toxicity that existed in my backyard. The mundane and easily dismissible sites that have become a part of our modern life. I attempted to capture this anxiety in the series Transuranic. This is a series of 13 Uranotypes, an archaic photographic process that uses the radioactive chemical uranium instead of silver, from all the sites in the western U.S. that ship radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. WIPP is the nation’s only underground repository for radioactive waste. I traveled to each of the sites, documenting the locations and tracing the routes that radioactive waste is transported across our country on. In Transuranic I examine the citizen’s view of radioactive waste sites and their existence in the banality of everyday life.

Through these projects I have learned about the importance of going and bearing witness. I am increasingly aware of the connections between history and place and how often we repeat our mistakes. In February of 2014, an accident at WIPP forced it to shut down. Our nation has no solutions for the containment of radioactive waste and yet we are now in the nuclear renaissance, beginning to construct more nuclear plants. Two new nuclear energy reactors are currently being built at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the first to be built in over 30 years. Interested in these issues, I spent time in Georgia photographing the residents, plant workers and inside Plant Vogtle. I was genuinely interested in the community and the influx of thousands of temporary workers constructing the plant.

LA: What do you see as the connective tissue among your various series? There seems to be more at play than nuclear legacy.

AH: I am interested in the human relationship with landscape and technology. I examine our demands on technology and the result when it fails us. In an ever-increasing technological world we rely less on nature and less on each other. Our health is often the currency in these transactions. My own cognitive dissonance plays a big role in my work, I love technology and I demand far too much of it. I am also fascinated by nuclear history and many of my closest friends are nuclear engineers. Ultimately, I aim to provoke the viewer. Through humor, absurdity and confrontation, I encourage an examination of subject matters that are often taboo.

LA: How has your background in psychology informed your artwork, if at all?

AH: My examinations come from concern about health but I am also interested in why people believe the things they do. In addition to provoking my viewer, I am also interested in rescripting mediums and experiences. “Imagery Rescripting” is used in cognitive behavioral therapy and uses imagined images to intervene on traumatic memories. I often choose my medium in an act of rescripting. For example, using a billboard to critique media and propaganda in Nuclear Mascot or using the radioactive element uranium to create prints in Transuranic. By rescripting, I suggest that it is not the material itself that is the cause of evil but the hand that controls it and I attempt to alter its pathology. This seems like a natural evolution, as I worked in a cognitive psychology research lab for years studying Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

LA: Your recent experiments with bioluminescence seem to be a departure from your photographic series. Can you talk about this series and the ways in which you use technology as process and subject matter?

AH: My primary artistic mediums are electronic art and photography. They are both tools in which I investigate the human relationship with the landscape and technology but they also speak to my fascination with light and electricity. Nuclear Illuminations is a series of biological street lamps. One street lamp is made with bioluminescent algae and two path lights are made with bioluminescent bacteria. The lamps have servos in them and they are connected to microcontrollers that are activated when nuclear-related keywords appear on Google and Twitter. The bioluminescent organisms illuminate when the microcontrollers trigger the servos and the liquid is agitated. Viewers see the biolights illuminate when the online conversations are active and they can also participate in the conversation on twitter and see the result in real-time.

After the Fukushima accident, scientists had discovered green microalgae in the waters around the plant. That strain of algae has the ability to accumulate radioactive nuclides including iodine, strontium and cesium, from water and soil in the heavily contaminated area in Fukushima. Algae may be one of nature’s ways of remediating the damage that has been caused by the nuclear disaster. After working with toxic chemicals in photography I wanted to create a project using organisms that remediate the environment. Once again I am thinking about methods of rescripting in terms of process. Technology plays a role in using virtual conversations to trigger the biological light. I am suggesting that perhaps we heal through conversation and through demanding transparency when it comes to our health.

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.

Daniel W. Coburn: The Hereditary Estate

Daniel W. Coburn lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas. His work and research investigate the family photo album employed as a visual infrastructure for a flawed American Dream. Selections from his body of work have been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York. Coburn's prints are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Mulvane Art Museum, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and the Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art. He has been invited as a guest lecturer at national and international photography events including the International Festival of Photography in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and the Helsinki Photo-Media Conference. Coburn received his BFA with an emphasis in photography from Washburn University. He received his MFA with distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Photo Media at the University of Kansas.

Interview conducted by Deedra Baker 

The Hereditary Estate Statement

Quiet suffering occurs within a family unit living under the auspices of the ideal American Dream. A psychologically violent relationship with loved ones, and an immersive cult-like experience with an evangelical Christian church contributed to my loss of spiritual and domestic faith.

These issues take center-stage in a story that emerges from the walls of a single-family sanctuary and unfolds onto a Midwest landscape. In my story, these characters exist at the intersection of domestic duress and spirituality.

I photograph my family in parables of love, reverie, respect and quiet tragedy. These images are a tangible manifestation of fantasy, memories and experiences acquired during my journey to adulthood, and function as a supplement to the family album assembled by my parents.

Deedra Baker: The Hereditary Estate is your first major monograph. Why was it important for your photographic work to be presented in a book format?

Daniel W. Coburn: For me, the book format provides a unique curatorial opportunity. The experience we have when flipping through the pages of a book is much different than walking into a physical space and interacting with work in a traditional exhibition. Both can be dynamic in their own way, but I enjoy the book format because I have control over sequencing. It allows me to take more control over the narrative and create a powerful psychological dialogue between carefully chosen images. My goal is to inspire a strong psychological response from my viewer, and I think I am able to accomplish that with a book.

All of my work is a response, or supplement to the traditional family photo album. Most family photo archives are filled with visual cliché's: a series of staged happy moments that punctuate the banality or tragedy of everyday life. These collections became the visual infrastructure for the false ideology of the American Dream. The Hereditary Estate is a family album, one that is designed to puncture that illusion. It just makes sense that it is presented as a book or album.

DB: Throughout your oeuvre, you appropriate and / or utilize the vernacular photograph. How do you acquire said photographs? What is the nature of their existence in The Hereditary Estate as they are paired with images from the series, Next of Kin and Waiting for Rapture?

DWC: I am fascinated by amateur photography. I collect amateur snapshots for pleasure and include them in my own work. I find them in a variety of places: antique stores, estate sales, garage sales and online auction sites. My approach to collecting is similar to my strategy for making my own photographs. I am looking for images that possess a dark psychological undercurrent, ones that don't fit the paradigm of the ideal American family.

I am also looking for images that have a similar potential, but require some sort of intervention on my part. In recent work, I have been physically altering these vernacular photographs to transform the family narrative.

Designing the book has been an exciting challenge. It's as much about the language of photography as it is about family. I am interested in the syntax of an image or photographic object. For instance, how does a weathered family photograph from the 1950's work in conversation with a modern digital photograph? How can I use this dynamic relationship to add context or commentary to a complex family narrative? You'll have to buy the book to see how it all comes together ;)

DB: The Hereditary Estate explores themes of the “American Dream,” family dynamics, and psychological trauma. Do you feel that in making this work you have grappled with your “loss of spiritual and domestic faith?” Or, do you see this body of work as a narrative of such experiences rather than an experience of catharsis?

DWC: I believe that I am telling an important story. I am inspired by artists like Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Ralph Meatyard and Larry Sultan, who believed something very important, inspiring, or life-altering can be found in the quotidian, or the everyday. My own family history is haunted by instances of substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide. Has this process been cathartic for my family and me? Yes, very much so. Can it be cathartic for my audience? I have found that many, or most people have similar stories in their own familial histories. I hope that people can look at my pictures and recognize a bit of himself or herself, or someone they know in the set of characters that I present. I hope that my work inspires conversation and discourse surrounding family, and the representation of family in pictures.

DB: There is a tenuous balance between the sinister and fragile in your photographs. As you make work, which depicts your family unit, do you see this juxtaposition as an important quality to these intimate, sublime images?

DWC: Jenna Garrett once described my work as "…a mixture of resentment, questions, and hurt always present in a ferocious love." I think this description is accurate. I am at odds with these people in my life. I love them, they love me, we have hurt each other, and we have survived each other.

I have described my mother, the powerful matriarch of my family, as having a presence that is simultaneously menacing and fragile. My father, intimidating because of his rough and brawny exterior, is actually quite vulnerable. This juxtaposition is important, but only because I want to provide a compassionate glimpse of the people that I love, but at times resent.

DB: There have been two successful years for you since your last Light Leaked interview (published September 03, 2012). What, if any, career, promotional practices, or working methodology changes have occurred between now and then? Also, please share information about your Limited Edition Collector’s Portfolio and Limited Edition Pre-sale of The Hereditary Estate.

DWC: It's important to me that my work reaches the public. Over the past two years I have been working feverishly to make new photographs and exhibit as much as possible. I see this new book, The Hereditary Estate, as a retrospective, but also as a conceptual work of art. It's a physical supplement to the broken family album that exists in most family archives. The book is being published by Kehrer-Verlag with international distribution, which means this new album will appear on bookshelves in homes all over the world, completing a necessary conceptual component of my work.

I am currently working to schedule a series of exhibitions and signing events surrounding the release of the new publication. I am excited to announce that the first in a series of traveling exhibitions will take place at the Mulvane Art Museum from January 9th - March 14, 2015.

I am offering a limited edition pre-sale book as well as a special collector's edition portfolio to offset framing and shipping costs for this traveling exhibition. The book is priced below retail cost for a limited time. I would greatly appreciate your support.

Christopher Colville

Christopher Colville was born in 1974 in Tucson Arizona.  He received his BFA in Anthropology and Photography from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico.  After leaving New Mexico, he returned home to the Sonoran Desert and is currently living in Phoenix.  Christopher has spent his time in Phoenix exploring the desert while teaching at several educational institutions, most recently as a visiting Assistant Professor at Arizona State University. Christopher’s work has been included in both national and international publications and exhibitions.  Recent awards include the 2012 Critical Mass top 50, the Humble Art Foundations 2009 New Photography Grant, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Project Grant, a Public Art Commission from the Phoenix Commission on the Arts and an artist fellowship that allowed him to travel to Iceland through the American Scandinavian Foundation.

When not making work Christopher can be found spending time with his wonderful wife Melanie, while trying to keep up with their darling young sons Wyatt and Oliver.

View more of Chris' work here 

Project Statement: Works of Fire

Works of Fire consists of multiple series that were born out of a fascination with the dual nature of creation and destruction.  The images in each series were made by igniting a small portion of gunpowder on the surface of silver gelatin paper. In the resulting explosion, light and energy abrade and burn the surface while simultaneously exposing the light-sensitive silver emulsion. I loosely control the explosion by placing objects on the paper’s surface, but the results are often surprising and unpredictable as the explosive energy of gunpowder is the true generative force creating the image.  These fire prints visually reference celestial events, the residue of both creation and obliteration, generated from a single spark.

MFA Thesis: Daniel W. Coburn

Daniel W. Coburn lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Selections from his body of work have been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York. Coburn's prints are held in many public and private collections including The Mulvane Museum of Art, The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, The Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art and the Moraine Park Museum. His writings and photographs appear regularly in regional and national publications including Fraction Magazine and Photo-Eye Magazine. Coburn received his BFA with an emphasis in photography from Washburn University where he was the recipient of numerous honors including the Charles and Margaret Pollak Award. He is currently an instructor and graduate student studying photography at the University of New Mexico.

Find out more about Dan here 

Statement 

In Domestic Reliquary I use appropriated imagery and iconography to explore my own dark family narrative. A complicated relationship with my family, and an immersive, cult-like experience with an evangelical Christian church resulted in my loss of spiritual and domestic faith. My work relates specifically to these personal struggles and explores the quiet suffering that occurs within the perimeter of a family unit living under the auspices of the ideal American dream.

I use the salted paper process to reproduce a series of found objects and photographs. This antiquated printing technique is linked directly to the domestic environment because it employs simple household chemicals that combine to make the printing paper light sensitive. The imperfections and technical artifacts of the process allow me to simultaneously deconstruct and repair the image. This method is cathartic and has become a metaphor for my own personal healing process. 

By working into each print using a variety of mixed media, I create a series of one-of-a-kind domestic artifacts. This work explores concepts related to gender, loss of innocence, and the small tragedies that occur within the confines of suburban dystopia.  I correlate domestic to religious symbolism, reinterpreting objects and icons to create my own sacred visual vocabulary.