JUROR BIO — LORI NIX

Lori Nix has lived most of her life in the rural Midwest. A childhood spent playing in open fields and witnessing countless storms and natural disasters has left her with a deep affection for the American landscape. This love of the land and sky in its endless variations, and a fascination with the absurdities of life has developed into a series of constructed environments that form the basis of her photographs. Cardboard, plaster, faux fur and paint are employed to create highly detailed dioramas for the camera. Like a movie still, Nix's photographs capture the drama mid-story and it's up to the viewer to complete the narrative.

Her series "Accidentally Kansas" (1998-2000) re-created tornadoes, floods, insect infestations and other bizarre events that punctuated her childhood in the Midwest. Transplanting herself to New York City brought an urban feel to her scenes. In the series "Some Other Place" (2000-2002) neighborhood sidewalks, city parks and forays into the wilderness are reconstructed, playing out dark little dramas before the camera.

With the series "Lost" (2003-2004), Nix continues her investigation of the constructed landscape, this time examining the feelings of isolation and loneliness. Like much of her previous work, this series of photos blurs the line between truth and illusion. She subverts the traditions of landscape photography in order to create her own humorously dark world. Her photographs toy with romantic notions of landscape and her lush, rich color and theatrical lighting magnify a sense of isolation and melancholy. The obvious artificiality of the scenes does not diminish the tension created in the photographs. It is the 'fake' quality that enhances the enjoyment of the illusion.

The newest series "Shadows of the City" (2005-2007) finds its way indoors with interiors synonymous with our urban surroundings. Public spaces dedicated to history and science (and a few intimate spaces) lie deteriorating and neglected while nature slowly takes them back. The Natural History Museum lies in ruins while an old theatre remains empty of its occupants. The city of our future is not looking very promising.

Lori Nix has received several photography awards. She is a 2004 NYFA Individual Artist Grant recipient. In 2001 she was awarded a Light Work Artist-in-Residency, an internationally recognized photography organization in Syracuse, New York. She was a 1999 recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant; a Greater Columbus Ohio Arts Grant recipient in 1998; and participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2000.

Nix's "Shadow of the City" will be on view at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York, New York in March and April 2007, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle in May, and at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles in June.

Currently she has exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA, Miller Block Gallery, Boston, Alona Kagan Gallery, New York, White Columns in New York City, SF Camerawork and Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York and San Francisco, and the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, TX. In the fall of 2002, Light Work published a monograph to coincide with an exhibition of her work. Museum exhibitions include "Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory" at the

Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA, "Picturing Eden" and "Vital Signs" at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, Katonah Museum of Art's "I Love the Burbs" in Katonah, NY and "Innocence" at the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT.

JUROR STATEMENT — LORI NIX

As a former resident of Columbus, Ohio, where I lived as a young artist, I was always struck by the impressive and wideranging talent in the state. Thus, I was not surprised by the richness, quality and depth of the work I encountered while jurying this exhibition. Ohio has and continues to maintain a serious artists' community that is well respected, stretching to all four corners of the state. My task in selecting the artwork was arduous yet fulfilling, and I found a great deal of the work compelling and worthy of inclusion.

As a photographer who gravitates towards the narrative, where ever possible or relevant, I chose multiple works from each artist. Rarely does a single image illustrate an artist's thought process, so through presenting a series of works the viewer is given a sense of how ideas can be expressed through a body of work. The works in this exhibition reflect the outstanding tenacity and commitment of the artistic endeavor and I feel honored and privileged to have been given this opportunity to inspire artists to continue the pursuit of their creative goals.

LOCATION

Fort Hayes Shot Tower Gallery
546 Jack Gibbs Boulevard
Columbus, Ohio 43215
614-365-6681

GALLERY HOURS | MON-FRI 9am - 4pm
the gallery will be closed March 21-31 for the spring holiday break

FOR MORE INFORMATION | info@roygbivgallery.com

JONATHAN ACHOR
I have an affinity for people watching and love taking day trips. So, I spend my weekends going on trips around Ohio with camera in hand. The last year I have spent capturing the more colorful characters along the way.

BIO
Jonathan Achor (b. 1982) is a graphic designer, photographer, and video artist who lives and works in Columbus, Oh. He received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2006 with an emphasis in media studies. Currently, he is a full-time graphic designer with the design firm Huber+Co. Taking photographs, drawing, and making things in general occupies the rest of his time.

BEN BARNES
I am a self-taught photographer using traditional black & white photographic methods and materials to make silver-gelatin prints. My photography is an attempt to record the beauty in the forgotten, unfinished, left-behind, and otherwise seemingly unremarkable stuff of human activity.

JODI BOATMAN
It is the thought of loss that keeps me cataloging, tracing and re-tracing my steps. I catch myself staring at the freckles on a man's eyelids or the matted texture of a worn carpet, remembering. It is the eventual loss of these moments that I dread. I am searching for a meaningful and profound connection to my past. Through the use of the photograph I hope to comprehend my fixation with failed relationships, childhood dwellings and the death of my paternal Grandmother: all themes that perpetually bind me to the past. This work is about self-exposure, misunderstanding and failures.

I'm interested in taking the traditional interpretations of the photograph, a source or index for memory, and re-analyzing its role. What happens when the photograph becomes a simulation of a real event, one that was never photographed or written down and is remembered through the severed connections of time? How do I reconcile my presence in a place of absence?

It is also my desire to understand landscape, not as an anonymous pictorial setting, but rather as a specific location of a memory.

The places that I photograph are marked by a patina of use and are seemingly ambiguous to the viewer and yet, for me, they trigger a sense of longing for an explicit moment in my life.

When I begin each project, I set about testing my memory, making lists of all the things that I can recall in specific rooms in three locations: my parents' first house and both my grandparents' houses. I give myself guidelines and rules. I follow the pathways that I took to their houses, retracing my childhood steps. I think about the spaces that I daydream.

I have realized that the objects I most remember are the objects that I hated as a child. I remember my carpet, which unlike the soft shag in my best friend's house, was short and coarse with channels running through it. I spent hours on that carpet, running my fingers through the channels to get from one side of the room to the other. I remember the stains on the ceiling of my grandmother's bathroom and its pink decoration. I find that as an adult these are the objects and spaces that I seek out/ long for to somehow suspend myself between my past and certain future.

TIM BOHACH
I love photography. It's how I got started in art nearly twenty years ago, doing astrophotography. This led me to nature photography, and a correspondence course through the New York Institute of Photography. I learned a lot from the school and was fascinated by the possibilities and processes of darkroom work. I began developing and printing my own black and white film and experimenting with different techniques.

My first series of pictures were inspired by the artist Man Ray, whose work I very much admire. Man Ray pioneered the technique of making photograms; camera-lens images made by placing objects directly on the photo paper, exposing to light and developing. After that came a series of photographs made with a plastic 'toy' camera that I purchased while on vacation in a gift shop in North Carolina. I was captivated by the simplicity and directness of this spartan machine. The idea for this current work came about more by accident than intent. I had taken a break from photography to explore other mediums, notably painting and found-object assemblage. After five years though, the desire to be back in the darkroom was too strong to resist. There is something almost magical about seeing an image appear on the paper as it sits in the developing tray.

I began going through my negatives, selecting ones that I had never gotten around to printing. After making the pictures and allowing them to dry, two adjacent photos caught my attention (Forms/1). They seemed to belong together, to form a whole. I began exploring this theme, nature and the female body, with the other photographs that I had.

What has resulted is a series based on intuitions and observation; images that share a theme, a compositional element, a certain tonal range, or perhaps simply a feeling. Ultimately we are all an inseparable part of nature, even if at times we feel disconnected. My hope is that these pictures cause us to reflect for a moment on our relationship to the world around us.

NINA CAPORALE
I am interested in paradox as a source of endless creative potential. I believe that it is not only possible to realize this power for myself but to share this power with others. Though I continue to create objects and other works, I have begun to rely heavily upon digital media and performance as a means to engage people where they live - in their minds.

In this age of massive online social networking, the image is a primary embodiment of self. I generated this book as a means to confront and invest in my own image. The contrast of hand-scrawled notes and crisp, objective text demonstrates an internal dialogue which is complex, subjective, and emotional. The media/method of publication is transparent, acknowledging my relationship to consumer culture, yet empowering others to reproduce my actions for themselves.

JENNIFER CARNEY
Botanical Studies

With my black and white photographs, I attempt to build appreciation of nature by showing its sheer, simple beauty. Each photograph documents a pattern of growth I discovered in natural settings. With my camera, I sought to make a visual exploration and study of nature and botany. This study emerges from my own attempt to understand nature's sophistication. Though it was easy to find, I feel as though it is often overlooked. I tried to bring the aspect I was photographing more into view with the solid black drapery background. All the images were shot with a large format camera to capture detail and texture and each print is on a warm tone paper done with the silver gelatin printing process.

Among my inspirations are Andy Goldsworthy, John Pfahl, and the first photographs used to document and record.

GRANT FLETCHER
For over a decade I have been photographing interiors. The son of a freelance architect, I grew up walking past my father's home office everyday. Curious about his profession, I would regularly peer through his blueprints and trade magazines. This began my attraction toward structure and organized spaces, and over time I utilized the photograph to further examine various interiors.

"Unoccupied Classrooms" is a series of empty classrooms photographed from two polar viewpoints to echo the function of education. The viewpoint of the position of the teacher is reinforced by the camera's vantage point, in the front of the classroom. The viewpoint of a student is reinforced by the camera's vantage point by the rear of the classroom. While attending The Ohio State University, I have collected a variety of empty classrooms when they are not in use. Because I am attracted to the formal experience and properties of large format, I use an 8x10 camera with a wide-angle lens to render sharp detail allowing a consistency to detail in each composition. Each photograph is composed to render a strong vertical and horizontal axis in each room. The color in each photograph is conditional to the standard lighting in each classroom, which shifts from cool to warm in different compositions. I use all the lighting available to make the clearest possible photograph of each classroom so that each individual photograph is as faithful and accurate a record as possible. I call this leaving the room 'as is'.

I photograph interiors of classrooms, to capture a learning environment, but also to show of how we impact and utilize these spaces. My photographs of the empty classroom slowly reveal the impressions left behind by the room's users. In an environment that is designed for the masses, I question the existence of individualism within the university. Throughout this collection of empty classrooms, I offer a visual comparison of spaces that have been designed for education, but show the impression of each room's previous occupants.

GILBERT GONZALEZ
I use a 35mm camera with no digital manipulation to create a body of work I call Journey Through Glass. The series focuses on the impact of colored lights on clear glass, everyday objects like candle holders, vases, ice cream dishes, and beverage glasses. The clear objects become a blank canvas that can be painted on with colored lights. I shoot in macro to focus in very closely on a small segment of each object so the original shape and conceptual meaning of the object is no longer apparent or relevant. This close-up aspect emphasizes how colors softly shift and melt into one another and abstract shapes freely flow into one another, as is seen in a watercolor or pastel drawing. This technique creates a painterly quality in the photographs. The interaction of vibrant colors and unique shapes becomes the focus which transports the viewer to a secret new environment hidden within these common everyday objects.

MARCELLA HACKBARDT
Boys interested in expressing themselves through dance are virtually unrepresented in visual culture. They are also the minority gender in dance classes, and may encounter peer pressure to drop their pursuit in favor of other athletic outlets. This collection of photographs, titled "All Boy," documents and validates the boys' adventurousness and daring, as well as their grace and toughness, seriousness and exuberance, frailty and strength, clumsiness and poise. These images are portraits of complex human beings that are pursuing something they enjoy, with dedication and talent.

Growing up within regulating societal pressures is no less of a challenge for boys than for girls. The youthful male body involved in dance practice and training engages with and subverts contemporary American notions of gendered behavior. The boys in these images have had to negotiate the territory where the body and the self interface with the social body, and they have found contention--but also support and the mentoring of teachers and family.

"He's all boy" is a popular phrase adults sometimes use to compliment the parents of a son who exhibits rough, reckless or aggressive behaviors, implying that there might be set of physical behaviors that are natural and immutable. Titling the series "All Boy" reclaims and contests the meaning of such a term, seeks to expand boy culture and the construction of masculinity beyond narrow and limiting mainstream formulations.

NICHOLAS HILL
The series entitled "Views of Mount Fuji" began with an exploration of mark making using the photographic medium of cyanotype. Inspired by images in a calligraphy lesson book that I found in a used bookstore in Kyoto, I began the series by pouring the liquid medium onto a piece of paper and then manipulating the paper to create the fluid marks on the page. The physical gestures of tilting and folding the paper and watching the liquid medium flow became my calligraphic response. Once "drawn," I exposed the light-sensitive paper to the sun using hand-made transparencies as negatives, often layering one on top of another. The images in the transparencies are combinations of photographs and drawings that I made in Japan. Some are found images that I altered. The cyanotype process is one that I have used in a variety of ways over time. I opted to return to it in this series after seeing the traditional Japanese indigo dyeing technique, aizome, at a textile center in Kyoto. The rich blues that result from the process offer a graphic, monochromatic strength comparable to ink and brush drawings.

RANDY HUNTER
"Abandoning narrative and focusing on light and the body as an epistemological instrument, Randy Hunter produces experimental and lyrical video abstractions. "

The statement was written by Ryan Agnew.

RACHEL JAMES
I like stories at night in bed. The ones spoken in low voices, the ones I live inside while I guess the outcomes. Stories of awkward years growing up, of lovers, vacations, broken bones, family deaths. I don't need to know all of you; I don't need to know most of you, I just need these secrets from your past. The intimacies that make me giggle in bed next to you, the stories that make me shriek with awe or make me humble. The moments in which I hiccup a lost breath. And, in return, I will give you my stories too.

Daddy sat with me in bed each night until I was asleep. These are the years he told me the Chel-Ra stories. Chel-Ra is an elemental figure, meaning she is created from sticks, stones, or Kleenex, and the like. In the stories, she walks down the street, and depending on the weather, she survives or does not. It was not until I was in my early 20s that I realized Chel-Ra was Ra-Chel. Daddy told me my life: That sometimes I would be strong, and sometimes even a slight breeze wind could knock me down and I could fall apart. I don't remember which character, which story, I liked best. I suppose both make up every woman's life. But you are quiet; you don't tell me much. And instead I learn you let me watch.

I now find that my images are pregnant with mystery, rhythm, curiosity, narrative story, and something rather spiritual that I am not yet able to fully explain or understand—something that perhaps I haven't completely experienced yet. I tried to find the meaning and understanding in what I was doing and in my art, so I continued to photograph—make art. I see now the nature of my circular argument: I endeavor to understand by photographing. I don't need to fully understand, I only need to seek it, to know it exists, to continue my search, to always ask questions, and to photograph.

BENJAMIN S JONES
A Few Words About My Work...

First there was the big Bang, when matter itself was torn asunder.
Space, energy and matter expanded, time began.
Everything became more distant
the stars grew cold and eventually lost sight of one another.
Then, something changed...
Exhausted stars at the edge of the universe felt the tug of creation beconing them to come home
again
No one knew quite what to think; was this really the end, or was it a new beginning?
-
less overcast days seemed opressive. The constantly expanding city, suburbs and exurbs stood as symbols of our conspicuous consumption. After moving away and returning home I've begun to re-explore the place which I thought I knew so well...

In this new series of digitally altered photographs I am exploring the landscape as metaphor. The landscapes and architecture are familiar yet manipulated. In this series I want to explore the relationship of natural versus man-made and question the meanings of both in the process. For the last few years many of my projects have taken inspiration from industrial and commercial forms and processes. My works are hyperbolic amalgams that borrow from the worlds of design, architecture, engineering and popular culture. I harvest information, images and forms from the propositions that investigate issues of our rapidly shrinking world.

Benjamin S. Jones
November 2007

DANIEL J KING
The images I seek are beneath the surface, and along the perimeter of the designed social landscape, off the beaten path but not out of the city's shadow. I place the burden of dreams, yours and mine, on the places we live and work. Artificial and haphazard landscapes often ignored by society, or hidden from its inhabitants interest me in a very fundamental way.

From 2003-2004 I photographed the series "Grounded" focusing on the dreamlike experience of working at the military-industrial storage facility in Southern Arizona often referred to as "the Boneyard." This facility contains the wreckage of out-modded 20Th century defense, and offense, technology splayed across 1200 acres of the desert southwest.

By combining antiquated photo-mechanical cameras with the use of digital printing, I am reaching for a dynamic as much about the peripheral spaces as the object in focus. I prefer to explore rather than define a space, which tends to produce variations in vision tied to time lapse, discovery, and spacial blur.

QIAN LI
This video, inspired by a dream, is the life story of two humanized dots discovering love and hardship within today's society. The piece intends to evoke personal memories that are emotionally tied to viewer's own experiences. The visuals are strongly influenced by traditional Chinese brush painting. The rising and falling life of the dots is synchronized with the music, with the intent that they empower one another. The piece mixes classical music with cutting edge technology to create a deeply unique experience. The video was performed live, projected on a large-scale backdrop while a pianist played the music on the stage. The visual and sound created an intimate multi-sensory experience that hypnotized the mostly traditional audience, entering them into a three-dimensional world which they had never experienced before.
additional credits: Johann Sebastian Bach "Prelude and Fugue in A Minor" played by Angelin Chang

Full Statement
Artist: Qian Li

Trained as a traditional Chinese painter, I have adopted the principle of "expressing the spirit through form." Along with painting, I have studied Chinese philosophy and researched Buddhist art. During the past few years I have traveled to Dunhuang and Tibet to study their art and attempt to understand their spirit, both visually and philosophically. These themes in art and lyrical composition have served as the foundation for my work as a new media artist.

My artworks are exploring the conceptual resonance between contemporary and ancient mythology of energy. Digital images create an environment, which suggests, metaphorically, that the medium can reach beyond the physical world into a realm where matter slips effortlessly into energy. Reproducing a world in which breathing is synonymous with peace and beauty.

Short biography:

Qian Li is an Assistant Professor of digital media and graphic design in Cleveland State University's Art Department. She is fascinated with cutting edge technology and has worked in a variety of media including video, web, print, interactive art installation, 3D/2D animation, and digital photography. Qian has exhibited extensively in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

JAKE MECKLENBORG
Grandma's House is eight pairs of photographs shot at identical spots in identical condominium units. Specifically, these are the condominiums of my paternal and maternal grandparents, who moved from homes in the neighborhood where they raised their families to the same nearby condominium complex around1990 and purchased identical units in separate buildings. This series primarily concerns nature versus nurture, and asks to what degree similar people select similar living quarters and what formative effect, if any, identical living quarters have on the character of their occupants.

The series also concerns the nostalgia for grandparents and their residences, especially in the current era of improving health and life spans, where grandparents are more likely live to old age but due to technological and cultural change are unable to pass on wisdom and practical skills in the direct and pragmatic ways of the past. With today's youth being raised in a mass-produced physical world, the stories of grandparents who lived with no indoor plumbing, no air conditioning, and worked for a dime an hour are undermined by comfortable condominiums that resemble so much else of the post-visceral suburban landscape.

Viewed with my other recently completed photographic work and works-in-progress, Grandma's House illustrates my interest in the undefined and unresolved area between conceptual photography and traditional roving photography of the built environment. Unlike early conceptual work by Sol Lewitt, Bernt & Hella Becher, and more recently Thomas Ruff, this piece argues that an artist should fully acknowledge his own environment as influencing his ideas and decisions.

The photographs were made in one day with a Hasselblad SWC, color negatives were drum scanned, and images were printed digitally at 22X22. No auxiliary lighting was used. Precise placement of the camera in the two different condo units was made possible with Polaroid proofs.

BRADLEY OLSON
Using large format black and white photography, I am interested in the process of documenting and constructing representation of small-scale commercial "strip" buildings. The photographs imply an unbearably usual landscape of utilitarian buildings and their adjacent property. These types of buildings include bars, barbershops, groceries, tax consultants, transmission services and pizzerias. The architectural features of the buildings are both practical and typical. The awnings, doorways, siding, signage and windows are made from brick, glass, metal, and wood. Through standardized construction methods that require these materials, the buildings appear ordinary, familiar, and, at times, entirely forgettable. Similarly, representation of the buildings is created through my standardized photographic technique to make images consisting of apparently similar photographs.

These images imply a greater individuality than any one photograph, because the unavoidable comparison highlights what each photograph is and is not. The technique I use to systematically create these photographs is both rational and irrational, and results in series of images without one logical conclusion. One of the primary objectives of my work is to study the unintentional aesthetic of small-scale commercial "strip" buildings and the aesthetic of the resulting photographs. This aesthetic is uncertain, unexpected and frequently disappointing, and is void of immediately recognizable successes or failures of photographic form. In part, this disappointed aesthetic is created through repeatedly photographing similar buildings utilizing use appropriately unremarkable vantage points. The potentially arbitrary photographs are presented as groups of four to create images that question the autonomy and relevance of a single photograph and its ability to represent.

DAN OLSEN
People!!! It is O.K. We are all here together now.

Dano

JESSICA REED
As a young girl I experienced the loss of my home due to a fire. I lost not only my material possessions but also my sense of security. Experiencing this immediate loss has drawn me to photograph homes that have also experienced this loss, the loss if its inhabitants. I wander the roads, the back roads, the country roads, and the roads that have been forgotten over time. My sense of wonderment drives me to explore and photograph these places.

My companion is my camera and together we search for answers. In these situations the light appears as a splash of warm golden paint on the dusty wood floors. Doors are often kept open and furniture is tilted and placed in the most peculiar positions, as if time has left a clue for me. Sometimes it feels as though I am stepping in to a living time capsule. These houses have gone through a stage of alchemic transmutation. They have gone from a home to a vacant skeleton.

RACHEL REISERT
My photographs take shape in the backyard, a microcosm for the larger world, where on a daily basis, life in various forms begins, expands, and eventually dies. In the moments found and pictured, I consider the metaphorical possibilities of object and light, and the significance not only of what we know, but how.

As presence requires absence to be truly understood, light and shadow are interdependent necessities in bringing forth the photograph as object—mirroring the dualities in the world as in our own perceptions. By subtraction from the world, each image remains a fragment of space and time, creating something distinct, and simultaneously reflecting what has already passed. In this reductive and additive ritual, I acknowledge the continuous cycle of giving and taking, as it emulates the interchange of life and death. Beauty is affirmed within this transformation, heightening the awareness of desire and hope, as the picture becomes testament to the pleasure as well as the pain of life.

I offer these images as a poet extends words. Like lines of a poem, they remain elusive in how meaning is attached and allow for multiple understandings. Resolution is permutable, never becoming fixed or definitive. Perception and interpretation are key in discovering the intersections of our circles of knowing, and ultimately reveal our most fundamental connections as human beings.

KATIE SHANNON
My photographs explore one facet of America's inexorable relationship with the pursuit of happiness, depicting hyper-real environments where many people congregate in order to experience enjoyment. Visiting these types of places has become an American ritual, an experience associated with happy moments and memories. The presence of my camera interrupts these moments, resulting in an image of a peculiar and dramatized environment, one that is at times humorous but always a little unsettling.

These images are the result of a brief encounter between the individuals within these places and myself, an exchange created, mediated, and solidified by the camera. I was attracted to people who seemed simultaneously isolated from, yet tragically bound to, the saturated, plastic environment. A young boy is caught in an ambiguous gesture while standing in front of a carnival game, his overweight body personifying the larger than life, overly saturated environment in which he is situated. An employee wearing a Frisch's Big Boy costume is standing along quietly gazing at the camera, his or her identity completely veiled by a smiling advertisement. A man quietly poses beside a giant, red and yellow Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, his protruding belly mimicking its shape. "Money is the Root of all Evil" is the simple message printed on his hat. These adults, teenagers, and children are situated in an environment where experience is commercialized and individuality generalized. They exist within a dichotomy of the prosaic and the spectacular, a tension between desire and delight.

Like the individuals in my images, I exchanged an admission fee in order to enter a place conceived and constructed around the idea of providing opportunities for enjoyment. This environment could be considered an exaggerated, fantastical, simulation of a society in which each individual is incessantly encouraged to assume a position Within the Happy Crowd.

DUNCAN SNYDER
As I travel through my life I use my camera to record the intimate, personal, mundane, inexplicable and ultimately elusive moments ignored by many of us. I am linked to my vision/process, by interpretation of the world through my lens. I consider myself a photographic cartographer not unlike Lewis & Clark, Magellan or Galileo. However my mission is to carefully map the moments that fascinate and or perplex me with a camera instead of a map and compass or telescope. We as a people are always trying to figure out where we are going and so do I as I watch my life unfold. I hope I can confront the things I loosely understand with better authority if I scrutinize them with my eye and record them with my camera. When I become aware of these moments not only do I want to witness them but in turn capture and or interpret them. So much of what I see is in a constant state of flux and only through the camera and the print can I grasp a larger sense of my world. When I look at my images I find that so much of what I have assumed to be accurate is actually up to personal interpretation. This work is an extension of my passion for the enigmatic and transitory nature of the everyday world.

I use a variety of cameras and digital image making tools to enhance and retain my voice within the work. The process of working from emulsion to code and back again frees me to expand and contract these moments of truth. Only by this process can I turn them into a visual mapping of my life available to my viewers. I hope my work will satisfy my desire to share the ephemeral nature of the world.

LAURIE VON ENDT
"What is going on in this scene?" you might ask. With vultures circling above and a UFO hovering off to the left, it's anyone's guess.

My work is about landscape and its transformation. Whether it is trees that dance, rocks that glow, horizons that burn or spacecraft that stop by for a visit, my imagery is there for the wonder and amusement of the viewer.

KIMBERLY WEBB
Like lyrics to a song, one by one, the details, small and delicate are what make us whole.
Details are held together and passed on through our relationships.
The details that stir my memory of lessons taught.
The lessons taught to me by my great-grandmother, Nanny.
This collection of photographs is a documentation of these details that she has collected.
The objects that she has organized into her life and their history all have a different significance and memory attached to them, dependent on the viewing family member or friend.
She has given these inanimate objects life through her care and consideration.
And these details make her who she is.
And who she is has made me who I am.
When I think of Nanny, I think of her strength and determination.
How resilient and compassionate.
She is a rock that cannot be broken, yet remains immensely sensitive and nurturing.
The oldest of eight, a woman from poverty in the hills of West Virginia, Marie Adams has taken care of those around her.
I hope that she understands the potency of her presence.
Her beauty permeates all that surrounds her.
Everyday, her influence is present in my relationship with my daughter.

DAIV WHALEY
As a conceptual artist, I find myself working in several different mediums depending on the need and for certain technologies. Polaroid photography, on the other hand, is simply a love—a joy and a love of 'accidentally' capturing some perfect moment of beauty in the natural world and watching it develop before my eyes.

Flowers are amazing creations—their colors, shapes and sizes suggest organic explosions out of the earth—floral fireworks. Again, their organic systems—building themselves up out of the ground from tiny seeds and synthesizing energy out of pure sunlight, water and soil—make them amazing machines. Very good designs indeed from the greatest Designer!

With this juxtaposition in mind—the technology of nature—my Polaroid photographs are struggling attempts to fuse a science fiction aesthetic to natural beauty with technological assistance. Using unusual angles, close-up shots, light intensity, intentional blurriness of the images, as well as my own manipulations of the film as the pictures develop, I strive to create a modern or even futuristic feeling with each photograph. The title of each piece also contributes to this aesthetic, as words are very important.

As each Polaroid is an accidental capturing-and-creating process that occurs 'in the field,' I use no computer manipulations or software to create the effects seen in my images. In that sense, these photographs are a new and 'natural' phylum of flower imagery.

And so the circle completes itself.

JOEL WHITAKER
I am interested in the family photograph as a physical and metaphorical thing, a piece of paper that transcends all other pieces of paper - a reliquary of memory, hope, and utopian dreams. Specifically, it is the discarded family snapshot, a photograph that has been tossed aside because it does not meet family expectations or cultural demands for legibility that intrigues me. I look at the age, emulsion cracks, discoloration, and scratches, as well as the lighting, fragmented subject, focus, composition, etc., as a way to explore meaning in simple, often repeated, gestures and actions. These qualities, that often define the image as something to keep or discard, are the qualities I exploit in my work. I am intrigued by what the material begins to reference outside the image and how the decay of the material and my interaction with it alters ones understanding and appreciation of the photograph and its original intent or meaning. I want to redefine and reinvent the performative space of the family snapshot and draw attention to its greater mysteries by interacting with the image and the physical piece of paper through a varied method of mark making and alteration. I utilize the preexistent image and my interaction with it to draw attention to the often overlooked and in many cases more poetic nature of the material and the image to produce new photographs from someone's memory which exist as nothing more than a light trace on a piece of discarded paper.

EMILY ZELLER
My work focuses on abandoned buildings: factories, prisons, power plants, asylums—anything that once was an institution to society, that had people who spent their lives or their lives' work there, who imbued the place with its own life. The rest of the world has forgotten these spaces, and when I visit I stand in awe of the lives that were lived and the years that were spent within their walls. With each handwritten note, each tool left out, I wonder about the people who left them, what their lives were like, and why these relics were left behind. As vines snake through windows and trees sprout through crevices, I'm reminded of the power of man and the magnitude of industry, but the ever-greater power of nature. In visiting and photographing these spaces, I'm entering a world that not many experience. I want to document the space as it is, so I can see how it has changed over time, and have something to remember the experience of visiting when the location is inevitably lost to time, and ironically, progress. The emotions present in these buildings, the people who inhabited them, the years of service, the neglect of humans and reclamation by nature, and the concern of lost history all draw me in. My senses are pervaded by fullness and loss. I want to show the beauty of the decay, but I also want to capture the feeling of walking where no one has walked in years, of everything and everyone that used to be there and what they meant to each other. I want to convey the feeling of seeing the light of knowledge fall on a piece of the past.