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The 2009 Artists-in-Residence include: Yolanda del Amo, Meggan Gould, Leslie Hewitt, Priya Kambli, Dean Kessman, Karen Garrett de Luna, Doug Manchee, Rachelle Mozman, Demetrius Oliver, Eileen Perrier, Shawn Records, and Chad States. The work by artists who participated in the 2008 Artists-in-Residence program are showcased in the Light Work Annual (CS152), now currently available. Back issues of Contact Sheet and the Light Work Annual are available for individual purchase via the Light Work Online Store.
Cartons of paper began arriving a couple weeks before December artist-in-residence Priya Kambli made it to Syracuse herself. By the time she arrived, it was quite clear that Kambli would be using her time here at Light Work to complete multiple editions of prints from her series Color Falls Down. (One of these editions will accompany Kambli to the FotoFest reviews in March 2010.) This beautiful work spans multiple divides as the photographer combines old and new family photographs with personally significant objects and textures. Through the use of digital montage, Kambli pieces together different cultures, generations, and identities in the picture plane.
The genesis of Color Falls Down was Kambli’s move from India to the United States thirteen years ago; the series name comes from a popular Hindi movie song. Making these images helped the artist bridge the gap between these very different worlds. Work from the Color Falls Down series has recently been published in Kambli’s first monograph by the same name. which was produced by PhotoLucida as part of their 2006 Critical Mass Book Prize.
Kambli holds a BFA from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette and a MFA from the University of Houston. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Kansas City Artists Coalition in Kansas City and Living Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, among other venues. She has participated in group exhibitions at venues as diverse as Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh to the Italien Palatset in Vaxjo, Sweden. To read more about Priya Kambli and her work, visit her website.
November Artist-in-Residence Shawn Records has been photographing in Gray's Harbor in Southwest Washington State for the past three years. His series Harbor looks at both the decline and resurrection of this area, which has had more than its share of stumbles into the 21st Century. A region known for incredible natural resources and beauty, this place has also seen the failure of a declining logging industry, a nuclear power plant that foundered on the eve of opening, and the rise of meth use. Towns like Aberdeen, Washington, hometown of Kurt Cobain and where Records has photographed extensively, are places where the residents have to make their own sunshine in the face of so much economic and cultural fog. Records photographs the moments of strange beauty that save places like these and keep them on the map.
Records arrived for his residency with a set of portfolio prints and a gorgeous presentation book of the Harbor work. During his time here, he plans to realize exhibition prints of the series.
Records received his MFA in photography from Syracuse University. He also holds a BA in photography and writing from Boise State University. His work has been exhibited widely in venues such as Blue Sky Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Quality Pictures, Portland, Oregon. To read more about Records and his work, visit his website.
In her series, Archipelago, Yolanda del Amo explores the quiet but ever-present dramas that transpire between people who are present within the same photographic frame. We must rethink our immediate assumption that the co-existence of figures in an image presupposes a certain relationship between the people pictured. In her elegant and stoic photographs, del Amo plays with the ambiguous dynamic that grows between her subjects, who could be friends, couples, siblings, or even strangers. During her residency, del Amo plans to scan her 4 x 5 and 5 x 7 negatives and then experiment with print scale using our large-format inkjet printers.
Yolanda del Amo holds an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. She also received a BS and MS in mathematics from the University of Cologne, Germany. Her work has appeared in both group and solo exhibitions in venues including Hudson Franklin Gallery in New York and the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College. Del Amo is an assistant professor of photography at Southern Connecticut State University. She has been invited to be an artist-in-residence at the Spanish Academy in Rome next year.
"My work has drawn upon the long tradition of African portraiture since my first visit to Ghana in 1996. My objective was to communicate a less preconceived impression of what it is to be a person of African descent. Colour photography was my gateway into showing a vibrancy and realness not readily found in the media's reportage, black and white imagery at this time.
I was born and raised in London but come from a mixed cultural background of Ghanaian and Dominican descent, and this has presented me with questions about, placement, cultural identity and diversity."
— Artist’s Statement, July 2009
Eileen Perrier is a graduate of The Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as The Photographers Gallery, Tate Britain, and The Whitechapel Gallery. Perrier’s images were part of the exhibition Africa Remix, which included stops at the Hayward Gallery and The Centre Pompidou.
While in Syracuse, Perrier is exploring the unique cultural and historical landscape here, including sites that were former stops on the Underground Railroad. Her residency is held in collaboration with Autograph ABP. To read more about Perrier and her work, visit www.eileenperrier.com.
Hewitt's work has quickly gained a reputation for power, elegance, and beauty as she uses photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to explore fluid notions of time. In her hands, the camera becomes a tool that subtly disrupts the window effect and expectations of a photographic document. In still-life tableaux and installations, she uses snapshots, ephemera, and the residue of mass culture to reconsider the role history plays in our contemporary situation and collective consciousness. During her time in Syracuse, Hewitt is doing research for a series of photograph that are informed by 17th-century vanitas paintings, making scans with the Immacon, and producing large-format digital prints.
Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow for Africana/Cultural Studies. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibition venues includes the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in New York; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA><ART in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a 2008 Art Matters grant and the Cooper Union’s 2009 Urban Visionary Award. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She will participate in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship Program at Harvard University later in 2009.
For more information about Leslie Hewitt and her work please visit www.lesliehewitt.info
Dean Kessmann drove in from Washington D.C. before the July 4th holiday and has been working steadily ever since, with no time off for fireworks. Since his arrival, he has completed a full set of final prints for his series A Year at a Glance, work that examines the intersection of art and commerce within the rectangular format of art publications. Kessmann's amalgamated collages collect a year's worth of front and back covers from such magazines as Art in America and ARTnews. These complex montages offer an illusion of transparency to the marketing strategies utilized by these powerful publications as they appeal to the art-oriented consumer culture. Also during his time in Syracuse, Kessmann plans to begin work on other series that further explore the physicality of paper-based art. For his next project, Kessmann has scanned 365 pieces of blank paper and then digitally manipulated the scans to highlight the texture of the paper's pulp. The subtle patterns that emerge from this working method underscore the minute decisions that inform and influence the creative process.
Dean Kessmann teaches photography at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His work has been exhibited at a wide variety of venues, from appearances at Aqua Art Miami and PULSE New York to several shows at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. For more information about Kessmann and his work, visit his website at www.deankessmann.com.
Doug Manchee made the trip all the way from Rochester, NY, for his residency. He arrived with plans to create several book dummies from various series of work. Manchee has already assembled a magnificent edit, sequence, and layout for a book based on his series Archive, a body of work that was also the subject of the exhibition Picturing the Archive in May 2009 at Visual Studies Workshop. The 96-page book will build on the structure of the exhibition and will be self-published in a limited edition. Also during his residency, Manchee plans to shoot new images of bookstores and of personal photographic archives as a further exploration of how we catalog and preserve our visual history.
Manchee received both his BA and MA from San Francsico State University. He is currently an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is also Program Chair for Advertising Photography. Manchee has shown work at Thomas Werner Gallery in NYC, the Ping Yao International Photography Exhibition, Ping Yao, China, and Gallery Kunsler, Rochester, NY, among other venues. For more information about his work, visit www.dougmancheeprojects.com.
Chad States turned to Craig’s List and other online forums to find subjects for his series about masculinity. His images indicate that cultural differences, societal expectations, and personal histories produce myriad complex answers to the question, “Are you masculine?” Photographing his subjects in their homes and other domestic spaces, each image weaves together environmental portraiture with psychological topography. During his time at Light Work, States plans to turn his attention to shooting, editing, and printing images from another body of work, entitled Cruising, that investigates the performance of sexuality in the landscape of public cruising spots.
States currently lives and works from Philadelphia, PA. He holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BA from Evergreen State College. His work has been exhibited at venues including Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; Chashama Time Square Gallery, New York City; Daniel Cooney Fine Art Online Auction; FLUXSPACE, Philadelphia, PA; Torpedo Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; and Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York City. For more information about States and his work, please visit www.chadstates.com.
In her series Blackboards, Meggan Gould documents physical traces of the creative process in various locations, from the fine art studio to the science lab to the corporate boardroom. Even in the digital age, the black- or whiteboard remains a place where ideas take shape in successive layers of inspiration. Her time at Light Work will be spent realizing a portfolio of prints drawn from this series and others that she has in the works, including a collection of photographs that document the frenzied yet elegant dance of crows as they fly over the skies of Mumbai, India.
Meggan Gould holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her work has been shown widely, including exhibitions at such venues as Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea, and Sesi Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sao Paolo, Brazil. She currently teaches photography at Bowdoin College in Maine. For more information about Meggan and her work, visit her website at www.meggangould.net.
Rachelle Mozman’s series of digitally-constructed portraits, entitled Costa del Este and American Exurbia, examine the surreal and oddly beautiful quality of childhood within the gated communities of Central America and the United States. Her images raise questions about the glamour and the price of privilege in these environments that strive to create security in isolation. Mozman plans to edit and print for a large-format portfolio of digital prints during her residency. She will also be outside shooting new images for another series in which she photographs Girl Scout troops and their own unique culture.
Rachelle received an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited extensively in America and Panama, both in solo and group shows. For more information about Rachelle and her work, please visit her website at www.rachellemozman.com.
Karen Garrett de Luna will spend her time at Light Work preparing images for an upcoming exhibition of her ongoing series Articles of Faith. In this body of work, de Luna presents dual portraits of believers with the talismans and amulets that they normally wear hidden from view. These objects, worn close to the heart, represent a tangible connection to an intangible but powerful force of faith. Diaristic notations under the two-part images unify the portraits while deepening the viewer’s understanding of the subjects’ belief systems. Most often, these notations speak to the desire to remain protected and positive in life, rather than to specific religions. In focusing on these talismans as symbols of hope, de Luna creates a visible catalog of an invisible spiritual phenomenon. The exhibition will be held June 2009 in New York City in conjunction with En Foco.
Karen Garrett de Luna holds BAs in Dance and Mathematics from the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited in multiple shows including A3, a group exhibition at Time-Life curated by Rebecca Karamehmedovic, and Los Muertos Pequeños at Broadway Market Gallery. She won En Foco’s New Works Award #12 in 2008. For more information about de Luna and her work, visit her website at www.delunatic.net.
Demetrius Oliver
Lump, 2006
Demetrius Oliver arrived in Syracuse with two boulder-sized pieces of anthracite coal, as well as several other props, for use in building and documenting the “improvised sculptures in space” that form his series Firmaments. Working in response to specific domestic environments, Oliver combines prosaic materials, such as coal, light bulbs, and sometimes food, to reinterpret our perceptions of photography and also of the objects and spaces that we think of as everyday. Sometimes these improvised sculptures incorporate gesture and the human figure, which Oliver considers an excellent vehicle towards assisting his ready-mades. His work ultimately occupies a space between sculpture and photography as it tempts the viewer to discover the unexpected in the mundane.
Oliver holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been exhibited widely, including a 2008 solo show at Inman Gallery, Houston, TX. Oliver has participated in residencies at Steep Rock, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. You can read more about Oliver and his work at demetriusoliver.blogspot.com.
Since 1976 over 300 artists have participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program. Each year Light Work invites 12-15 artists to participate in this program. During their month-long residencies each artist is given the opportunity to create new work at our studio facility in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center at Syracuse University. Each Artist-in-Residence donates a few examples of their work to Light Work's permanent collection. The Light Work collection currently includes over 3,000 images.
Past Artists-in-Residence | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005
