Demetrius Oliver–Penumbra
Exhibition Dates: January 18–March 8, 2011
Gallery Reception (at Light Work): February 3, 5:00–7:00pm
Light Work is pleased to announce the exhibition Penumbra, a suite of three video installations by Demetrius Oliver, which reconnects viewers to their place in the universe by playing with earthly and human forms against a backdrop of the cosmos. In Penumbra, explorations of light and scale, movement and the rhythm of the natural world suggest journeys both physical and metaphysical.
Light Work Gallery: Mare, January 18–March 8, 2011
In Mare, a circular image of a wave crashes against an unnamed shore; the image spins within itself and simultaneously orbits the gallery. As the image rotates, the lines of the wave begin to resemble the layered surface of a Jovian planet such as Jupiter. Visitors to the gallery become part of the work as the projection reflects off their bodies. Joining the sea with both corporal and heavenly phenomena, the installation recreates the awe felt when looking at the night sky and the increasing smallness of human existence within the ever-expanding universe.
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Demetrius Oliver
Perigee |
Urban Video Project Everson Site:
Perigee, February 2011
At the Everson Museum of Art Urban Video Project site, Oliver will install the workPerigee, which echoes the same circular image of a wave that appears in Mare. A perigee occurs when one orbiting body, in this case the moon, is closest to earth, which makes tidal waves generally stronger. The movement of the video describes the rotation of both planets and the alternate rising and falling of the sea. Its projection on the site, framed perfectly against the stars, transports the viewer into the celestial continuum where earth and its inhabitants are affected by larger bodies in space.
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Demetrius Oliver
Penumbra |
Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery (Schine Student Center):
Penumbra, January 18–March 3, 2011
Penumbra, which will be installed in the Menschel Gallery at Schine Student Center, is a three-channel video in which Oliver’s head acts as a stellar body fading away as another body emerges to conceal it. The three videos play simultaneously, allowing Oliver to stretch time, the body, and space as the circle of his head becomes both a macrocosm of the universe and a microcosm of the body.
About the Artist
Demetrius Oliver lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA , and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME. From has participated in artist residencies at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Oliver was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 2009. His work has been exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Rhodes College, Memphis, TN; D’Amelio Terras, NY; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA; and The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Most recently his workJupiter was installed on the Highline Gallery in New York City.
Also on view at this time is the Transmedia Photography Annual exhibition, featuring photographs by seniors in Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia, part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Gallery hours for these exhibitions are Sunday to Friday, 10am–6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.
Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.
For more information, please contact Jessica Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.
In search of the Light Work Collection
/in NewsEvery once and while we just like to take a spin through the Light Work Collection, searching on a term to see what it turns up. Here’s a fantastic image by Chan Chao, titled Tin Taw Liang, that came up when searching on the word democracy. Give yourself a treat on Friday afternoon (or whenever you’re reading this), do a couple of searches, and post your favorites in the comments.
From the Files: Aaron Siskind
/in From the FilesThe Light Work files are full of great postcards (remember those?) like this one from Aaron Siskind to Jeffrey Hoone in 1986. Siskind, who was 82 at the time, had just closed an exhibition at the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery, and this card marks the safe return of the work from the show. A little piece of Light Work, photographic, and communications history all rolled into one little card.
Siskind’s exhibition, which is the subject of Menschel Gallery Catalog #3, was comprised of new images, all taken from 1980-1984. In the catalog, Hoone writes, “In this new work he continues to abstract the depth of visual poetry present in the objects that surround us by conveying photographically things felt as things seen. This conviction has been the hallmark of Siskind’s work for the past 40 years and this contribution will forever allow us to consider the essence of photography’s power as more than merely the accurate and faithful recording of visual facts.”
We’d love to hear your thoughts about Siskind and his work in the comments!
—Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
Marna Bell: Hudson Past/Perfect
/in ExhibitionsLight Work is pleased to announce the exhibition Hudson Past/Perfect, featuring photographs by Marna Bell, the winner of the Light Work/Community Darkrooms Members Juried Exhibition competition. Juror Stephen Mahan, director of the Photography & Literacy Project at Syracuse University, picked Bell as the winner, and awarded five Honorable Mentions to Jeremy Decharzo, Andy Frost, Genevieve Marshall, Meghan Schaetziel, and Mindy Lee Tarry.
In 2005, after the sudden death of her mother, Bell picked up her camera after a twenty year hiatus from painting and began photographing nature. Her focus in both painting and photography has been on reclaiming visions of the past and her connection to nature.
According to Bell, “Many trips back home to New York City on the train have helped me remember lost pieces of time where life seemed simpler and less veiled. It was a natural progression for me to record the cycle of change in my Hudson Past/Perfectseries. By revisiting the same landscapes in different seasons and under different weather conditions, I was able to capture the past before it disappeared. I am drawn to the meditative quality of the Hudson River and the sacred aspects of the natural environment.” The series is reminiscent of a more romantic era, when God and Nature were viewed as one.
About the Artist
Marna Bell received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Syracuse University. Her paintings and photography have been featured in exhibitions throughout New York State as well as at the Brenda Taylor Gallery in San Diego, CA. She received the Best in Photography Award in the Manhattan Arts International Online Exhibition, The Healing Power of Art (New York, NY).
Also on view at this time is Penumbra, a suite of three video installations by Demetrius Oliver, and theTransmedia Photography Annual exhibition, featuring photographs by seniors in Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia, part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Gallery hours for this exhibition are Sunday to Friday, 10am–6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.
Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.
For more information, please contact Jessica Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.
Demetrius Oliver: Penumbra
/in ExhibitionsLight Work Gallery: Mare, January 18–March 8, 2011
In Mare, a circular image of a wave crashes against an unnamed shore; the image spins within itself and simultaneously orbits the gallery. As the image rotates, the lines of the wave begin to resemble the layered surface of a Jovian planet such as Jupiter. Visitors to the gallery become part of the work as the projection reflects off their bodies. Joining the sea with both corporal and heavenly phenomena, the installation recreates the awe felt when looking at the night sky and the increasing smallness of human existence within the ever-expanding universe.
Perigee
Urban Video Project Everson Site:
Perigee, February 2011
At the Everson Museum of Art Urban Video Project site, Oliver will install the workPerigee, which echoes the same circular image of a wave that appears in Mare. A perigee occurs when one orbiting body, in this case the moon, is closest to earth, which makes tidal waves generally stronger. The movement of the video describes the rotation of both planets and the alternate rising and falling of the sea. Its projection on the site, framed perfectly against the stars, transports the viewer into the celestial continuum where earth and its inhabitants are affected by larger bodies in space.
Penumbra
Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery (Schine Student Center):
Penumbra, January 18–March 3, 2011
Penumbra, which will be installed in the Menschel Gallery at Schine Student Center, is a three-channel video in which Oliver’s head acts as a stellar body fading away as another body emerges to conceal it. The three videos play simultaneously, allowing Oliver to stretch time, the body, and space as the circle of his head becomes both a macrocosm of the universe and a microcosm of the body.
About the Artist
Demetrius Oliver lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA , and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME. From has participated in artist residencies at the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Oliver was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 2009. His work has been exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Rhodes College, Memphis, TN; D’Amelio Terras, NY; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA; and The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Most recently his workJupiter was installed on the Highline Gallery in New York City.
Also on view at this time is the Transmedia Photography Annual exhibition, featuring photographs by seniors in Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia, part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Gallery hours for these exhibitions are Sunday to Friday, 10am–6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.
Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.
For more information, please contact Jessica Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.
Transmedia Photography Annual Exhibition: Best of Show Award
/in ExhibitionsLight Work is pleased to announce the Transmedia Photography Annual exhibition, featuring photographs by seniors in Syracuse University’s Department of Transmedia, part of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. For this exhibition, Light Work has collaborated with Innova Art Ltd to award a Best of Show and two Honorable Mentions.
Juror Scott Conarroe, a visiting artist from Canada, selected the recipients of the Best of Show Award and two Honorable Mentions. John O’Toole, recipient of the Best of Show Award, will receive $700 worth of Innova paper, plus $200 worth of digital printing at Community Darkrooms. The two recipients of the Honorable Mention Award, Genevieve Marshall and Varvara Mikushkina, will each receive $150 worth of Innova paper. Other finalists in the competition were Soloman David Schechman and Mary Gannon.
According to Conarroe, “It was a real pleasure for me to spend time with the work in this show. The quality of the images and the scope of inquiry were more than interesting; this is an inspiring collection of photographs. I am particularly grateful to John, Genevieve, and Varvara for this early glimpse into what I expect will be significant practices in the years to come. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who contributed to this Transmedia exhibition.”
John O’Toole — Best of Show Award
O’Toole’s series What Was Once Familiar… depicts Catholic Memorial, an all boys private Catholic school in Massachusetts for grades 7-12 attended by the artist. These images explore schools both as places that are consistently in a state of flux, with students graduating and teachers moving on, but also as environments that remain constant and familiar to the community of people that grow together within these institutions.
Genevieve Marshall—Honorable Mention Award
Marshall’s work investigates the complexity of feelings she has toward her father and their relationship. Since her parents divorced in 1995, her father has never owned a home, and as a result, their time together is spent occupying public space (diners, job sites, etc.). Marshall uses this series as an opportunity to assess her place within his world, and create meaning from the spaces that meant nothing to her.
Varvara Mikushkina—Honorable Mention Award
Mikushkina photographs her family, capturing how certain immigrant tendencies are inescapable. The work communicates what she likes to call, “the immigrant soul.” The images communicate an understanding of intimacy and the invitation to someone’s cultural home, where that specific culture is sustained within foreign grounds that it inhabits.
About Innova Art Ltd:
When it comes to color-critical digital printing, INNOVA delivers to the photographer, artist, print production house and print buyer. INNOVA’s un-paralleled line of fine art digital printing products include award winning FibaPrint®, Photo, Fine Art, Eco-solvent and Book Art papers, available in cut sheets and rolls up to 60″ wide. Innova also offers internationally recognized canvas, new INNOVA Art Cards, and the patented JetMaster Display System. For more information about INNOVA, visit www.InnovaArt.com
Also on view at this time is the exhibition Penumbra, a suite of three video installations by Demetrius Oliver, which reconnects viewers to their place in the universe by playing with earthly and human forms against a backdrop of the cosmos. In Penumbra, explorations of light and scale, movement and the rhythm of the natural world suggest journeys both physical and metaphysical.
Gallery hours for these exhibitions are Sunday to Friday, 10am–6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.
Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.
For more information, please contact Jessica H. Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.
Organizing the Light Work Collection
/in Re:CollectionIn 1985 we put together an exhibition from our collection titled Light Work: Photography Over the 70s and 80s. The exhibition opened at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and then traveled to several locations throughout the state for the next two years. Most of the work in the exhibition was donated to us by artists who had participated in our Artist-in-Residence program (AIR).
When we did the retrospective exhibition in 1985 we realized that we had a unique collection that would continue to grow along with our AIR program. So in 1992 when we began to catalogue and digitize the collection. Our goal was to make the collection accessible and searchable from a number of different perspectives. In 1992 the database technology, and especially the image data base technology, was nothing like it is today. There was no Internet, and the founders of Google were in grade school. We were able to digitize the work in the collection using Kodak’s Photo CD service where you sent Kodak 100 slides and they sent you back a CD filled with digital files. Kodak also had an image database program called Shoebox, and we used that as our first database.
We created a number of fields in the database to help us organize the work with obvious functions like artist’s name, dates, titles, catalogue numbers, and where the print was located in the collection. Because it was a collection of images, we also wanted to try and develop a way to search the collection in order to find works that might relate to one another. One way to do that was to use a keyword field that might include general descriptions of the image like, portrait, landscape, abstract, etc. We thought that this system was too limited for a number of reasons, including the general nature of the descriptions, and the objectivity of whoever had the task of assigning keywords to each image.
As I am writing this I am looking out over a very snowy January Syracuse landscape, so I decided to type “winter” into the search box in the collection. The search produced 42 matches including work by Peter Finnemore, Hank Willis Thomas, and Gary Metz. I’ve just included the images here along with the caption information and would be very interested to have your comments about the results.
—Jeffrey Hoone, Executive Director
Image: Peter Finnemore, Mad about the Cow.
From the Files: Carrie Mae Weems
/in From the FilesAs a case in point, in 1986 Carrie Mae Weems wrote this letter (click to enlarge) to then Director Jeff Hoone to introduce herself and offer to give a lecture at Light Work. In the letter Weems gives brief descriptions of her series Family Pictures and Stories, South-East San Diego, and Ain’t Jokin’.
Weems went on to be a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 1988. Her contributions to Light Work include seven pieces in the Light Work Collection, exhibitions in 1996 and 2003, and the donation of prints to the Eatonville Portfolio and to our 2011 Subscription Program, which features an image from the Kitchen Table series. Her work is included in Contact Sheets 61, 97, and 124.
Best from the Rest: Dawoud Bey
/in ElsewhereMany of those who are calling for censorship of free speech say that the government should not be supporting art they don’t agree with or find offensive. If you dig down deep enough there are very few endeavors in the United States that the government does not support or help make possible. When we eat anything made from corn, or travel or ship goods on an interstate highway or through an airport, or simply turn on the faucet and have clean drinking water, all of those things and many, many more are made possible with government support. All of these essential things are the benefit of living in a free society. In order to keep America free there is no doubt that the government should support free speech.
If you can control and limit free speech, then you can control people, and that is real power. Freedom, and especially freedom of speech, so clearly defines who we are as Americans. We are a country with over 300 million citizens who are encouraged to speak their minds and there will always be opposing viewpoints on most issues and subjects. One of the great roles that artists play in our society is to ask difficult questions of how we are negotiating our progress as a culture. Artists celebrate the joy and triumph of the human spirit and illuminate the darkness and despair of our struggle. The only way for us to continue to move forward is to allow ideas to be contested in the public arena and to keep expression and speech free.
There will always be subtexts of whose voice or what group is being attacked when censors try to prevail, but any attack on free speech is an attack on us all, and that is what must be resisted at all costs. In the United States we all need to unite to preserve free speech.
—Jeffrey Hoone, executive director
Image: Ted Wathen, War Memorial Coliseum, Syracuse, NY, 1981.
From the Light Work Collection.
Yolanda del Amo Weekend series on Flak Photo
/in NewsYolanda has been a steady presence at Light Work since her residency in 2009, which was devoted in the main to working on images from Archipelago. These beautiful images were also the subject of a recent Light Work exhibition, and they are featured in Contact Sheet 159, which you can preview online here. The image Winfried, Brigitte is in the Light Work Collection, and we’re proud to offer Edith, Juan, also from Archipelago, as part of our 2011 Subscription Program.
Great to see Yolanda and her images getting more and more exposure, and thanks to Andy Adams and Flak Photo for helping to get the word out on the best of what’s happening in photography today.
—Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
From the Files: Alfredo Jaar
/in From the FilesIn 1989, Alfredo Jaar created the installation Sheer Conviction in the Robert B. Menschel Gallery, our exhibition space located in the Syracuse University Schine Student Center. These are the floor plans for the exhibition that Jaar drew up after visiting the gallery. Click on the images to enlarge them.
Six light boxes, each 96 x 20 inches, were suspended from the ceiling with the wiring hidden so that the boxes would appear to float when the room was darkened. The light boxes featured photographs on both sides—one side displayed images of anonymous protesters, the other side pictures of soldiers.
Jaar’s eloquent commentary on state suppression, both the apparatus that supports it and those who attempt to subvert it, found a perfect home in the Menschel Gallery.