Artists-in-Residence: 2005

Keith Johnson
January 2005

Light Work is pleased to introduce our current Artist-in-Residence Keith Johnson. Keith arrived at Light Work in January armed with boxes of large- format paper for photographic and digital prints. He has since been vigorously printing chromogenic photographs on our Hope processor, while also preparing digital museum-quality images for his upcoming exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia. A prolific artist, Keith has set out to create his final chromogenic print portfolio, before switching permanently to digital prints.

Keith Johnson has been involved in photography since the early seventies. He graduated in 1975 from Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA and studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind after spending a year at Visual Studies Workshop with Nathan Lyons. He has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently in solo shows at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI; the Art Institute of Boston; The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY.

www.keithjohnsonphotographs.com

Rik Pinkcombe
Untitled from the series France 04, 2004

Rik Pinkcombe
March 2005

After an adventurous flight from London and winter-related delays in Washington, DC, our new Artist-in-Residence Rik Pinkcombe has finally arrived. Rik comes to Light Work at the recommendation of Autograph, an association of black photographers in Great Britain.

Determined to photograph new work, Rik has been shooting new film in Syracuse daily. His current series touches on issues of perceived vs. staged reality. His large-format images question the common understanding of reality.

Rik attended school at Blackpool College of Lancaster University. Trained as a commercial photographer, Rik shifted to art photography after a prolonged battle with leukemia made him reevaluate his life. Rik lives in London. Recent exhibition venues include the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in Greenwich and the 921 Gallery in Hackney, Great Britain.

Martin Kollár
April 2005

Slovakian photographer Martin Kollár is no stranger to traveling. His photography regularly takes him all across Europe. So it is a little surprising that the venues he seeks out are frequently small, neighborly events of normal people going about mostly ordinary tasks. Within this framework however, Martin succeeds at capturing extraordinary moments. They are the kind of snippets of life we would love to tell others about, if we ever bothered to notice them. His images hone in on moments that are ever so easily missed. However, once captured on film they stand out with a profound level of humanity. Martin has exhibited his work internationally and is currently working on a book project to be published in Paris. Among other photographic awards, he recently received a Leica Oskar Barnack Award Honorable Mention. When not traveling, Martin lives in Bratislava, Slovakia.

www.martinkollar.com

Kanako Sasaki
April 2005

Japanese photographer Kanako Sasaki mixes a sense of girlhood with a hefty dose of spunk. Her playful series "Wanderlust" is rich in humor and vivacity. While at Light Work, Kanako plans to expand the series. First color prints have already rolled off our processor. She is currently scouting for locations around the Syracuse area to stage her imaginative photographs, which are inspired by childhood memories as well as Japanese traditional paintings and novels.

She attended Ithaca College and the School of Visual Arts.   Her work could recently be seen at Hitotsubo-ten Gallery and Morta Politica Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, and at the Visual Arts Gallery and the Local Project Gallery in New York. New work will be on exhibition at Art Cocoon Gallery in Tokyo, Japan in April.

Angelika Rinnhofer
May 2005

German-born artist Angelika Rinnhofer began her residency at Light Work ready to print her newest work as large-format color prints. Angelika describes her series Menschenkunde as portraits that combine facts, beauty, and irony in a Renaissance-style. Her newest series, Felsenfest, continues the same aesthetics in its re-interpretations of catholic saints into a modern context. Angelika remembers being frightened as a child when viewing the horrific images of tortured saints commonly found in churches in her hometown Nürnberg, Germany. She now casts a critical eye, juxtaposing religious figures with modern-looking scientists. Since arriving, she has printed many of her striking photographs and has also continued photographing for the Felsenfest series.

Angelika lives and has her artist studio in Beacon, New York. She is a commercial photographer and artist. She is the recipient of a Kodak European Gold Award and recently received a fellowship in photography from the Dutchess County Arts Council.

www.amrphotographie.com

Michael Schreier
May 2005

Canadian artist Michael Schreier arrived in Syracuse with his digital camera and ready to photograph new work, which he describes as "portraits of anonymous people." He approaches strangers on busy downtown areas and asks to take their photograph. The encounter lasts only a moment and is documented by the date and time printed below each photograph. He is interested in the sense of integrity and overcoming of vulnerability that are established even in these brief, chance encounters. The emotional sub-context for this work is Michael's experience of moving from his native Vienna, Austria to Canada as a child. The Syracuse portraits along with interior/exterior architectural photographs will be incorporated in an ongoing book project Tears for an Empty Desert. He has been working on this project for the past two years.

Michael lives in Ottawa, Canada. Recent exhibition venues include Peak Gallery in Toronto. He recently completed a residency at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.

Peggy Nolan
June 2005

Peggy Nolan is a woman with keen sense of adventure, a passionate love of life, and endless energy. She discovered photography fairly late and then by accident, but has been inseparable from her cameras ever since. Seeing photographs all around her, she photographs her seven children and any aspect of her colorful life. Since coming to Light Work, Peggy has been photographing, printing, learning new digital processes, baking cookies, and sharing in the lives of the people all around her. This is a homecoming of sorts for Peggy, who attended Syracuse University in the 1960s.

Peggy lives in Hollywood, Florida. Recent exhibition venues include the Museum of Modern Art ("Picturing Modernity"), Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and more. Her work can be found in the collections of SF MOMA, Norton Museum of Art and Martin Z. Margulies in Florida.

Jennifer Greenburg
July 2005

Chicago artist Jennifer Greenburg recently arrived in Syracuse ready to jump into her residency at Light Work. Her primary project will be editing and printing her series The Rockabillies, which examines a subculture of people who have adopted a lifestyle and values common to the middle class in the late 1940s and 1950s. Communities of Rockabillies exist in small pockets all over the country. During the past five years, Jennifer's work has taken her from Chicago to Los Angeles, Nashville, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Miami, Austin, Carbondale, and Orange County, CA. While at Light Work, Jennifer also plans to photograph old entertainment parks, drive-in theatres, and other establishments of a modernist era long gone.

Jennifer lives in Chicago. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Harold Washington College. She received the Stuart and Iris Baum Completion Grant in May 2005. Recent exhibition venues include the IUN Gallery for Contemporary Art and the ARC Gallery. Work from The Rockabillies is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as part of the Midwest Photographers Project.

Ben Gest
August 2005

Ben Gest's work gives a new meaning to the expression "more than meets the eye." His work is as contemplative and quiet, as it is restless and emotionally charged. Gest modestly describes his work as "narratives of personal and simple everyday activities." But he goes through extensive steps to create these narratives from multiple separate photographs. The end results are large scale photographs that are alluring from a distance and unexpectedly detailed upon closer examination.

Since arriving at Light Work, he has rarely stepped away from his computer. The first images are now rolling off the Light Work inkjet printers. Each is the result of countless hours spent on compilating many different images to create these believable yet artificially created photographs. Gest considers these images "an outgrowth of his interest in photography's potential to tell the story of human life while considering its ability to create objective truth."

Ben Gest was born in Caldwell, NJ. He earned a BA from Rutgers University and an MFA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago.  Gest has exhibited nationally and institutions such as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Gest currently works as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia College, Chicago.

Suzanne Opton
September 2005

Portrait photographer Suzanne Opton has approached many subject matters from unusual angles. In her images, CEOs leap onto tables, female bodies wrap around household objects and brothers stand proudly in a twisted landscape. Her newest series Soldier reflect a curiosity about the military at a time of war. As she describes, "It is not sensationalism I am after. I am after the human being." She has had the opportunity to photograph around seventy soldiers who recently returned from their tour of duty in Iraq. The series includes two parts. The first is a group of formal black-and-white portraits. The second part is a group of closely cropped photographs showing only the soldiers' heads laying on a flat surface.

Since arriving at Light Work Suzanne has scanned many 4x5" negatives from the series and is currently experimenting with large format printing of the head images. She also hopes to continue photographing soldiers for a third part of the series.

Suzanne Opton's work has been exhibited worldwide and has appeared in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her series of nudes, Loose Change, is the subject of a chapter in Vicki Goldberg's newest book, Light Matters (Aperture, 2005). Suzanne lives and works in New York City. www.suzanneopton.com

Migdalia Valdes
October 2005

Migdalia Valdes recently arrived in Syracuse after a cross-country drive from San Francisco. In time to see New York state glow in red fall colors, she has settled in quickly to attempt the incredible feat of working through five years of materials, including thousands of sheets of negatives and hundreds of rolls of unprocessed film. Dedicated to a practice she developed in 1999, she sets out to photograph at least one meaningful image every day, regardless if this necessitates a single frame or several rolls of film. Migdalia fills her daily journals with contact sheets, found printed matter, small objects, news clippings, and personal notes. While at Light Work, she hopes to bring some order into her many notes and negatives, as well as to print select images from the open-ended project, which is aptly titled Everyday.

Hank Willis Thomas
October 2005

The old adage may advise to 'walk gently and carry a big stick,' but Bay area artist Hank Willis Thomas seems to have recoined the phrase, allowing his images to speak softly but carry a big 'whack.' His photographs, beautiful in composition and formal quality, carry a heavy punch emotionally. Since arriving at Light Work, Hank has been quietly working away. He admits that it is not unusual for him to be working on at least four different projects at any given time. Just a few weeks into his residency, he has spent his time scanning images on Light Work's high resolution scanner, editing photographs for his upcoming four exhibitions, working on his branding series, adapting his short film "Winter in America" on the murder of his cousin into film stills, and preparing for an upcoming lecture at a regional conference with the Society for Photographic Education.

Hank holds a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and an MFA in photography and MA in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His work has been shown in museums and galleries across the country. He has upcoming exhibitions at P.S.1 MoMA in Queens, NY; the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in Jamaica, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA.

www.charlesguice.com
www.lisadent.com

The work by artists who participated in the 2005 Artists-in-Residence program will be showcased in the next Light Work Annual, to be published in the summer. The publication will be sent to all 2006 subscribers of Contact Sheet. Back issues of Contact Sheet and the Light Work Annual are available for individual purchase via the Light Work Online Store.

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