This fall, Light Work is offering four exciting and diverse exhibitions in its gallery spaces, dealing with such issues as womanhood, life and death, children, and borders.

View from Here

In the main gallery, Light Work features the work of Japanese photographer Kanako Saski in an exhibition titled View from Here. Sasaki expresses an eccentric and surreal mood to create a dream-like world. She draws inspiration from traditional Japanese novels and love stories, Ukiyo-e paintings, and her own childhood memories. Sasaki’s imaginative work creates a world where as she describes "ordinary life becomes more extraordinarily focused." Her images capture their own piece of Ukiyo, the concept of a floating world, where nothing in life is too small to be worth notice and a trivial gesture can epitomize the experience of a lifetime.

Sasaki travels extensively, but primarily divides her time between Tokyo and New York City. Living part of the time in the United States, Sasaki has felt the urge to associate herself and her work with her own Japanese culture in order to identify herself in this society. The result is an exhibition of chromogenic and digital prints which mix girlhood with vivacity, humor, and spunk.

Apart from the humorous aspect of the images, the exhibition also touches on the issues of mortality. Sasaki says of the exhibition, "Through my work I also try to emphasize life and death. I used to be very scared of death, and in a way, setting up these scenes, laying in the grass, is kind of like a rehearsal for death. The work is meant to create a universal meaning that goes beyond the playfulness and girlhood you see on the surface."

Secret Games: Collaborative Works With Children 1969–1999

The hallway space of Light Work’s main gallery features the work of internationally renowned artist and educator Wendy Ewald in an exhibition titled Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969–1999. The exhibition consists of about one hundred images from Mexico, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

For over thirty years Ewald has taken an unusual artistic path exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults around the world in a sustained evolving artistic project. Addressing conceptual, formal, and narrative concerns, Ewald’s work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South America, Holland, Mexico, and the US.

Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, Ewald’s project has evolved over the years to focus on questions of identity and cultural difference. In all these projects, she partners her keen observational and creative skills with her subjects’ visual inventions. She encourages children to use cameras to create portraits of self and community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams, and hopes. Ewald herself makes photographs, sometimes giving her negatives to collaborators to mark and write on, mixing the images in such a way that it is challenging to know who actually "created" a given image. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist’s identity, Ewald crosses the border that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.

Light Work will host a reception celebrating the exhibitions on September 29 from 6 to 8 pm. Also, Wendy Ewald will give a lecture with a book signing and reception immediately following on September 13 from 6 to 8pm. The gallery hours for these two exhibitions are Monday–Friday, 10am–6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. There are a limited number of free parking spaces available, please RSVP to reserve.

I Wish That My Sister Would Talk One Day: Photographs by Fifth Graders from the Ed Smith Elementary School

To accompany the Wendy Ewald exhibition, the members’ wall of Community Darkrooms is currently the exhibition site of photographs made by fifth grade students from Ed Smith Elementary school in Syracuse. The students participated in a project of photographing their lives and then writing about their images with the guidance of their teacher Mary Lynn Mahan. This work, a local version of Wendy Ewald’s project, will be on view in Community Darkrooms from August 15–October 15. Light Work will host a lecture by Mary Lynn Mahan and visiting artist Stephen Mahan on September 17 at 4pm.

Borders

In addition, Light Work is hosting an exhibition titled Borders, featuring work from the Light Work Permanent Collection. The exhibition was curated by students taking an Art and Identity class at Syracuse University, and examines the idea of borders. The students were challenged to question the idea of borders—are they boundaries and restrictions, are they edges?

Using hot button issues like spirituality, ethnicity, sexuality, and globalization as discussion topics, the students discovered how they viewed borders in the genres of gender, life and death, human relationships, seen and unseen, social norms, and becoming. According to Mary Lou Marien, professor to the Art and Identity course, "For the students who conceived this exhibition, borders are not walls but windows overlooking a terrain where imitations are more common that certainties."

This exhibition was created as part of the Syracuse Symposium and is on view in the Robert B. Menschel Media Photography Gallery in the Schine Student Center. The gallery hours for this exhibition are Sunday–Saturday, 10am–10pm, except for school holidays.

Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. For more information on any of our exhibitions or programs, visit our website at www.lightwork.org, or call 443-1300.