Community Darkrooms reopens

Light Work/Community Darkrooms reopened September 8 new and better than ever. We renovated our digital labs, complete with super fast Epson printers, and added a fantastic lounge to our facility over the summer.

Also in Community Darkrooms, our new Tech Heads are on duty Sunday through Thursday, from 1-6pm, to help you with your image-making. The Tech Heads can get you started with scanning, working in Photoshop, and using our Epson 4880 printers. They can also help you out in the black-and-white lab. Just come in during Tech Head hours and get the answers to the questions you need help on most.

To celebrate our renovated facility and new services, we’re holding a special opening event on September 20. The event is free and open to the public and will start at 12pm with free Apple laptop cleanings by Maccentrix (first come first served), tours, portfolio reviews, and more. At 1pm, we will host a free digital color and workflow seminar by expert Clark Omholt of Spectraflow. Attendees will also be able to pick up a coupon good for 25% off an order from our digital services lab. There will be a raffle to win a free 30 x 40″ print from Community Darkrooms digital services.

Registration for Fall workshops is also open now. Visit our website to see our current offerings and to register.

Light Work and P.E.A.C.E. Inc.: Photography at the Little White House of Hope

Photography at the Little White House of Hope:
Collaborations between Light Work and P.E.A.C.E. Inc. Westside Family Resource Center

In August 2009, artist Stephen Mahan worked with Light Work and P.E.A.C.E. Incorporated Westside Family Resource Center (WFRC), also known as the Little White House of Hope, to conduct a workshop for teens about photography, identity and community. When he arrived with 20 digital cameras, he found a unique and vibrant community center run by Mary Alice Smothers and her colleagues. The WFRC is located on Wyoming Street and offers a variety of services and programs to families that live in and around the Near Westside, including employment support, youth activities, advocacy and resource development and education life skills. Their mission is to help people in the community realize their potential for becoming self-sufficient.

Smothers and Mahan made a great team with their combined passion and belief in the strength of the human spirit, as well as their understanding of how creating images of community and identity can foster self esteem, and build awareness and pride in the southwest side’s unique and richly diverse community. At the end of the workshop, large-scale digital photographs were installed across the street from the Little White House of Hope on West Street by local business Media Finishings. The exhibition will be up indefinitely, and the hope is that it will continue to grow over time.

The partnership between Mahan and WFRC is also deeply in line with the goals and efforts of the Near Westside Initiative (NWSI), a nonprofit corporation housed at Syracuse University and partnering with the greater Near Westside community. The NWSI, owners of the Case Supply Warehouse, were thrilled to showcase the artwork as public art on the side of the building. “This project has been great on so many levels. It has educated youth, it has encouraged and fostered the arts, and it has beautified a widely visible building in Syracuse, bringing great attention to the Near Westside community, and the residents that live there” says Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near Westside Initiative.

Mahan is an artist, photographer, educator and community activist. He has worked with Light Work/Community Darkrooms on numerous occasions. His innovative curriculum was inspired by a national movement to promote literacy through the arts and is proving to be a great success in promoting communication skills and self esteem.

Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run, photo and imaging center in Syracuse, N.Y. Our mission is to support emerging and under-recognized artists working in photo and photo-based media. We do this through exhibitions, publications and an internationally renowned Artist-in-Residence Program. We also seek to foster an appreciation and understanding of contemporary photography in Central New York through classes, workshops, lectures and community programming.

For more information contact, Mary Lee Hodgens, program manager, 315-443-5785.

Barry Anderson: Intermissions

Barry Anderson: Intermissions
August 14–October 21, 2009
Reception with Syracuse Symposium Lecture Event: Tuesday, September 29
(Reception 5–6pm, Lecture 6–8pm)

Light Work is pleased to announce Intermissions, an innovative art exhibition and related programs featuring the video and photographic art of Kansas City artist Barry Anderson. In a time of economic uncertainty and other societal stresses, this project provides viewers a welcomed artistic interruption to daily life. Anderson’s work, and the entire project, is designed to bring art into the community, and focuses on reminding people of the importance of remembering to stop and enjoy the moment. This exhibition will reach the community as a whole, including people who may not normally visit a gallery—they may come across the project by walking by a video projected onto a building or by driving past a billboard whose function is as a piece of art instead of an advertisement.

Anderson’s colorful video pieces include abstract patterns, nature scenes, and semi-nostalgic images from decade-old advertising. Each piece creates a good-natured, introspective scene that contrasts the busy settings where the work is shown. Anderson’s work addresses our cultural need to escape the onslaught of media input through isolated fantasy worlds. By slowing or re-interpreting space and time, he strives to identify the existence of introspective spaces within the everyday, proposing that we don’t need to retreat, but to re-envision and re-think what is already around us. Light Work’s project places video art and photographs at multiple venues across Syracuse, making it accessible to the general community and creating many opportunities for meaningful interaction with the work.

The level of collaboration that is provided through this exhibition and programming is an exciting step for the arts in Syracuse, and will bring a common thread through all involved spaces during the exhibition period. Embracing the concept of art intervention, the exhibition will expand beyond Light Work’s main gallery to many venues in town, thereby creating dozens of points for interaction both indoors and outdoors. This represents a departure from Light Work’s usual photography exhibitions and allows the entire community to become engaged with the work. The following partners will participate in this unique collaboration with the Light Work gallery spaces: the Everson Museum of Art, multiple venues at Syracuse University, SUArt Galleries, Syracuse Symposium, The Warehouse, the Urban Video Project, Orange TV Network, Community Folk Art Center, the Red House Arts Center, and more. Exhibition sites also include public spaces such as billboards and multiple video projections onto buildings in downtown Syracuse.

Find out what work will be shown where and when by consulting the fold-out maps available at all participating venues and an animated map on Light Work’s flat-panel screen. Maps are also available for download from Light Work’s website at www.lightwork.org. Visit Light Work’s blog or Facebook page for the latest event updates, photos, and other exhibition-related news. Planned events include a gallery reception and lecture by the artist as part of the Syracuse Symposium programming, workshops, tours, among other exciting programs. This project is receiving support from Syracuse Symposium, the Division of Student Affairs Co-Curricular Fee, and the Central New York Community Foundation.

Anderson’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the country, as well as in Thailand, South America, Cuba, and the UK. Recent exhibition venues include the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS; Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago, IL; Salina Art Center in Salina, KS; Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri in St. Louis; Hotcakes Gallery in Milwaukee; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto. He participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2006. Anderson was born in Greenville, TX. He holds an MFA from Indiana University. Anderson’s installations, single-channel work, and still photography can be seen on his website.

This project is receiving support from Syracuse Symposium, the Division of Student Affairs Co-Curricular Fee, the Central New York Community Foundation, and Lamar Outdoor Advertising. Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating, presented by The College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. The Central New York Community Foundation connects the generosity of donors with community needs by making grants to organizations working to enhance the quality of life of those who live and work in Central New York.

Gallery hours at Light Work are Sunday to Tuesday, 10am–10pm; Wednesday to Friday, 10am–6pm; and by appointment. The gallery is closed during Syracuse University holidays. 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 the Marion parking lot and Booth 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 about any of these exhibitions, please contact Jessica Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhheckma@syr.edu.

**Digital press images and image information from both exhibitions are available upon request.

Chad States, interviewed and blogged

Nozlee Samadzadeh at The Morning News posted an insightful and in-depth interview with Chad States, who did a residency here at Light Work in June 2009. In the interview, titled “Men at Their Most Masculine,” Samadzadeh and an accompanying image gallery focus on States’s series of portraits and texts that seek the answer to the question, “Are you masculine?”

Later the same day, Jezebel ran an item on the interview and States’s work that has generated over 13,000 hits so far and a lively discussion on the definitions of masculinity and femininity in the comments section.

Read both sites for some interesting perspectives and commentary on this intriguing and beautiful series.

Intermissions gets under way

Syracuse is the site of Intermissions, a multi-venue exhibition project featuring Barry Anderson’s colorful and enigmatic video and still work. The exhibition creates opportunities, sometimes in unexpected places, for a refreshing change of view from everyday life.

The first of Anderson’s installations, including a screening of his video Pigeon at the Everson Museum of Art and three billboards in various locations around Syracuse, are up. The exhibition is already making its presence known, with a long front-page article in today’s CNY section of The Post-Standard. Also posted online today is videographer Ellen Blalock’s interview with Barry Anderson – you can watch the in-depth discussion with the artist on Syracuse.com. Finally, open at the Menschel Gallery in SU’s Schine Student Center is Suspension, an exhibition of Anderson’s moving and eloquent aerial photographs.

Click here to see a list of all the venues for Intermissions, and keep your eyes open for Anderson’s work as you drive around town.

Carrie Mae Weems on Art:21

Season 5 of the PBS series Art:21 opens with an episode entitled Compassion. The episode, which premieres on October 7, 2009, features interviews with artists William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and former Light Work Artist-in-Residence Carrie Mae Weems.

In her segment, Weems discusses the presence of compassion in her work and how the use of appropriated images can help to open a dialog between the past and present. Click here to see a preview of Compassion on the Art:21 website, which also features an interview with Weems and Dawoud Bey, himself a former Light Work Artist-in-Residence.

Three Light Work connected artists at Carrie Haddad

Robert Flynt and Warren Neidich, former artists in residence at Light Work, and Gary Schneider, with whom Light Work published Genetic Self-Portrait, are exhibiting at Carrie Haddad Gallery July 16, 2009 through August 30, 2009. The exhibit, “Afterglow: Four Photographers & the Hand-Held Light,” also includes the work of David Lebe.

Melissa Stafford, curator, says about this exhibit:

The work of these photographers is vital and never still. Their images register something of what human life is and of what human life might be; present fully in every instant of time. The gleaming tracery evokes a gradual recognition of nose, mouth, chin, and neck coalescing into a recognizable form like “man”, or even an individual, like “Christopher”, but this body transcends those familiar, literal forms. Alfred Stieglitz, a hundred years ago, believed that personality could not be expressed by a face alone. The work in this exhibit agrees; it attempts to further sensitize photography – extending the medium to take in more and more of life’s fleeting glow.

The exhibit opens Saturday July 18 with a reception from 6 to 8 pm.

Carrie Haddad Gallery
318 Warren Street
Hudson, NY. 12534
518.828.7655

Testing 1, 2, 3 . . .

Barry Anderson has been in town for about a week now doing tests at various sites for his upcoming exhibition Intermissions. Over fifteen separate venues all over Syracuse will show work by Anderson, a former Light Work Artist-in-Residence whose video and photo-based imagery occupies a space on the border between the commonplace and the surreal.

The first installation, the video Pigeon, will open at the Everson Museum July 25. Anderson’s video and sound piece Fragments, Spirits, Dust Bunnies, shown here in the installation process as Anderson answers interview questions, opens in the Light Work Main Gallery August 14. Click here to see the full schedule of Intermissions venues, including over 10 billboards throughout the Syracuse area.

The Light Work Annual 2009

The Light Work Annual is one of the most anticipated issues of Contact Sheet of the year. In the Annual, we feature images by our Artists-in-Residence, as well as insightful essays about their work. We also highlight the winners of our Light Work Grants in Photography program. The Annual provides a snapshot of all the exciting, ground-breaking art, exhibitions, and events that happen at Light Work over the year.

The Light Work Annual 2009, which will ship early in July, is bursting at the seams with 96 pages. It features photographs by our 2008 Artists-in-Residence including Scott Conarroe, Kelli Connell, Lola Flash, Cristina Fraire, Admas Habteslasie, Deana Lawson, Paula Luttringer, John Clark Mayden, Christine Osinski, Oscar Palacio, Xaviera Simmons, Amy Stein, Krista Steinke, and Garie Waltzer. Contributing essayists include Dawoud Bey, Julie Bolcer, Josh Brilliant, Leslie Rose Close, Karen Irvine, David L. Jacobs, Allison N. Kemmerer, Stuart Krimko, Peter MacGill, Maria Moreno, Alison Devine Nordström, Franklin Sirmans, Alec Soth, and Spring Ulmer.

If you subscribe today, you will receive The Light Work Annual 2009 as your first issue of Contact Sheet. Click here to see the 2009 subscription program offers, with beautiful prints and books that can make your subscription to Contact Sheet even sweeter.

Picturing New York: Christine Osinski

Christine Osinski, who was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in September 2008, has photographed the activities of an all-female swimmers club on Staten Island for several years. An image from Osinski’s swimmers series is included in the exhibition Picturing New York: Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art and in the accompanying catalog.

You can see the exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid through June 14 until the show travels to the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto in Italy for a viewing from July 11 to October 11. The Irish Museum of Modern Art will host the final installation of the exhibition from November 25 to February 7, 2010.