The Hartford Art School Photography department is pleased to announce a Group Exhibition of photography. The exhibit entitled
The Art of Seeing: Photo-editing and Presentation is opening in the Silpe Gallery at the Hartford Art School on February 12th from 5:00 to 7:00 PM and will be on display till February 18th.
A photography presentation on the work of emerging talents, who focus on the critical practice of editing their images from a fall course with a dialogue around seeing as found in the book by practitioner and educator (Visual Studies Workshop) Douglas Holleley “Photo Editing and Presentations: A Guide to Image Editing and Presentations for Photographer and Visual Arts”, who also was our guest, He and Ben Lifson, the well-known critic, educator and art historian, gave lectures on picture editing, the final evaluation of images and the “art of seeing”. The photographic work presented by these undergraduate students, all majors, in the results of this course work.
Descriptions of the work of the four photography students in the show can be found below as well as examples their work.
Benjamin Cegelka works in color and makes large multi-panel artworks informed by light shifts at night, using the landscape and long exposure, with colored gels and flash. His lush palette speaks to another world of the early to late evening. His presentations may reference the structure of the bellows or the mirror inside a camera. Sequenced and articulate, his color shifts expressing the “violet hour” of deep blues and saturated hues render these nightscapes as minimal and beautiful, quiet and thoughtful.
Jeffrey Dietz uses black and white photographs that document the skateboarding sub-culture of suburban young men. His angular shots capture Carier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” in the 21st century as these young males suspend in the sky, like dancers in the air or athletes jumping. The rough edges of a filed-out negative carrier, recorded in black, echo their outsider status, anti-heroes to some, and heroes to each other.
Bartosz Jankowski revisits street photography with color using New York City as his open-air studio, specifically the lower parts of Manhattan, known as the East Village. Full of all types of characters he focus’s his lens on these lost souls, marginal bits of humanity, seemingly rootless, tattooed, decorated, or otherwise existing outside the norms of society. Visual arresting, he embellishes the mood of his prints with subtle veil and tint of color – red or green – in his masterful color printing in the darkroom.
Frances Rivera uses her self as a point-of-departure to explore the meaning of her life through daily rituals, in a (imagined) day. She takes pictures of herself in black and white in the bathroom, applying mascara and stepping out the door. Frances uses the mirror, in the bathroom or in the hallway, for its symbolism, picture sign and as a metaphor on her own existential dilemma. Her own physical image and its reflection are seen, sometimes in multiple facets, with slivers of light, from various sources, creating unique composition within a normal home in suburbia. The end results are large scale black and white prints, beautifully toned to emphasize the rich array of grey to blacks, with flashes of light and white, to underscore her own personal quest, which is universal to all of us at one time or another, on life’s meaning and our relationship to it.
This past Friday I attended the opening of The Polling Place Photo Project, A Citizen Journalism Exhibition at the Hartford Art School. The exhibit was curated by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand of Winterhouse and they were both great to talk to. It was a wonderful experience and displayed the project in many different formats, there were also films by Andrew Sloat.