LaToya Ruby Frazier
Lecture, Reception & Book Signing
Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014
Artist Talk: 6:30 p.m.
Reception and book signing following talk.

Watson Theater*
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
Syracuse University
316 Waverly Avenue
Syracuse, NY 13244

Light Work would like to invite you to a lecture, reception and book signing by LaToya Ruby Frazier on Thursday, Oct. 30 on occasion of her new book, The Notion of Family. Frazier’s lecture will begin at 6:30 p.m. in Watson Theatre located in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center on Syracuse University’s campus. The lecture will be followed by a reception and book signing. Signed copies of this anticipated new publication will be available for sale for $75. Purchases include an annual Contact Sheet Subscription ($40 value).

Seating is limited, please arrive early.

For those that cannot attend the event, signed copies of The Notion of Family can be pre-ordered online here.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier earned her BFA from Edinboro University (2004) and MFA from Syracuse University (2007). Frazier attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2007), the Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2009), and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (2011). Recent solo exhibitions include “Born By A River” at Seattle Art Museum, “Witness” at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, and “LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” at Brooklyn Museum, and “Inheritance” at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum Biennial (2012); Incheon Korea Biennale (2011); “Commercial Break,” Garage Projects, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); “Aperture Foundation Green Cart Commission: Moveable Feast,” Museum of the City of New York (2011); “Pittsburgh Biennial,” Andy Warhol Museum (2011); “VideoStudio: Changing Same,” The Studio Museum in Harlem (2011); “LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph,” Charlottesville (2011); “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2010); “Mother May I,” Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2010); and “GESTURES: An Exhibition of Small Site-Specific Works,” Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh (2009). Frazier’s awards include the Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Prize from the Seattle Art Museum (2013); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts (2013); Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award (2012); Art Matters (2010); the S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Award from National Academy Museum (2008); and the Geraldine Dodge Fellowship Award from the College Art Association (2006). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2010) and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2008).

*Watson Theatre and the Robert B. Menschel Media Center are located in the same building as Light Work. Watson Theatre is located directly across the hall from our main gallery space, the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery. 

Light Work‘s lab and community spaces serve as a home base for many graduate and undergraduate students at Syracuse University. With this series of blog installments, we wanted to showcase the work of a few of these recent graduates who have actively used our spaces in the creation of their thesis projects.

Today, we interview Sarah Pfohl, whose work you can find here.

LW: Where did you grow up? How does that affect your work?

I’m from rural Central New York State, about an hour south of Syracuse. To be more precise: The place where I grew up, defined by experience rather than a map, covers 3 counties, parts of 2 telephone area codes, and 7 distinct villages, none with a population of more than 2,000 individuals. Together, these places cover around 35 square miles of Central New York State. Populated by approximately 4,000 people, the place I define as coming from consists of a land mass 7 times larger than New York City. I am from a hill where my family has lived since 1960. My maternal great aunt and uncle lived next door on one side, my paternal grandmother and aunt lived on the opposite side. I lived here until I was 18.
For my thesis work at SU, I photographed my mother here, in the place where we both grew up.

LW: What are you focusing on in your current work?

Right now, I’m focused on learning more about how to make landscape and portrait photographs and want to use these skills to make a body of work that foregrounds the close, intimate relationship my mother has with the land and plants she knows very well. As I move forward with the project, I want to bring together a group of photographs of a single person in a particular place that in foregrounding this interrelationship, address issues surrounding rural representation and land use in rural spaces.

LW: What do you consider a successful photograph?

I want surprise, but the location of the shift in perception that I look for can happen in a bunch of different places (the way the subject matter is represented in the image, the installation/contextualization of the image/s, the conceptual framework that informs the work) and be rich and engaging.

LW: Talk about the title of your thesis show…

The intimate relationship my mother has to the place where we both grew up, that I try to make visible through the photographs, is present in the lives of all people, through their reliance on the natural resources housed, cultivated, and stewarded in rural places. I titled my thesis show The forest rests also in you to underscore this fact. I wanted to include a feature in the work that asked that the audience to consider their own relationship to wild spaces through a set of photographs of plants and my mother. I used the title to do this.

LW: What artists are you looking at right now?

Susan Worsham, Sally Mann, Viviane Sassen, Carrie Mae Weems, Roni Horn, and Emmet Gowin. TIANXIN (Sophie Chen), Peter Puklus, Jay Muhlin, and Bryan Graf. John Chervinsky, Zeke Berman, and Jan Groover. I read a lot of Wendell Berry.

LW: How has your work shifted in your time at SU?

I came to SU from a formal education and professional background outside art photography (in drawing, art history, and education). Technically, I’ve gotten more precise. I learned how to pay better attention to light and the frame.

LW: How did you find Light Work?

In 2007 I was living in Central New York and needed to learn how to use my new digital camera. A friend recommended I check out Light Work/Community Darkroom’s workshops and I found a workshop that helped me.

LW: What resources or artists have you connected to there?

I got to meet and have reviews with Susan Worsham and Aspen Mayes. In terms of resources: Big printers, calibrated monitors, a great library of photobooks and magazines, John Mannion’s keen eye and patience for helping me make my prints better. I also love going to Light Work because I always run into people there that care about photography and a number of great unanticipated conversations have emerged from these informal meetings.

LW: Graduate School creates a space both for education and for artmaking. How have both of those spaces informed each other?

I was able to use my coursework requirements at SU to take classes that helped me think more critically, effectively, and deeply about ideas I wanted to engage through photography.

LW: What are your plans after graduating?

Making pictures and reading! I’m working on a new photography project called Clepsydra (about water and time) and will continue to photograph for the project that became my thesis here at SU. I just accepted a position teaching art education at Central Michigan University for the 2014-2015 academic year and am very excited that I am going to be able to continue teaching in higher education. Also, my partner and I are co-curating the next issue of Oranbeg NET together, hosted online by Oranbeg Press.

Light Work Lab is changing the way we think about photography education with a brand new model we like to call Light Work Lab SESSIONS.

SESSIONS are based on the idea that the best way to learn about photography is having great instructors work with you on your own projects regularly, in a small group setting.

That means a SESSION is an hour you spend with our expert staff, in a group of no more than three people, working on learning goals you create. That also means SESSIONS are for everyone, no matter your skill level. If you are just starting out, or advanced and honing your craft we can help you go further with your photography. Plus, SESSIONS are ongoing – there is always one coming up soon, so there is no need to wait on a course schedule.

SESSIONS are affordable, one hour is $15 for members and $30 for non-members with no commitments, take as many or as few as you need.

Here’s how it works:

1. Visit www.lightwork.org/education and find the topic that’s right for you.

2. Select a SESSION time that fits your schedule.

3. Tell us as much as you can about what you want to learn about, what steps you want to take, and what interests you have. This helps us prepare a lesson plan thats right for you, rather than a one size fits all curriculum. After your SESSION is complete, feel free to stay and continue working on your projects for the rest of the day.

SESSION Topics:

Import + Organize
Get your files or film organized in the right application for your needs. This SESSION covers everything from the best way to get your photos from your camera into Lightroom or Bridge to making the best possible scans of your negatives, slides, or prints. Learn the how to set up an organized file management system and how to backup your data so you can spend more time working and less time hunting through hard drives.

Process + Print
Learn how to digitally process your photographs in applications like Lightroom and Photoshop to get your photos ready to share with the world. We stress a consistent workflow for managing color, contrast, dust, scratches, and sharpening to craft accurate prints every time. This SESSION also covers resizing images, digital manipulations and more!

Camera + Studio
For those who are just learning how to use a camera, or taking the next step in learning how to control exposures, depth of field, lighting, and framing. We can help you learn or master the use of any type of camera and all the gear in our Lighting Studio. This SESSION is recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to take full advantage of their camera with our strobe lights, light shaping tools, and backdrops.

The Dark Arts
Learn everything you need to know about working in the Light Work Lab Darkroom. This SESSION covers the development of black and white film and creation of prints in the darkroom with an emphasis on controlling exposure and contrast. This SESSION can also accommodate more advanced techniques like split filter printing and alternative darkrooms processes.

SESSION reservations can be made online at www.lightwork.org/education or by calling 315.443.2450.

Light Work is excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Centscere for social-media based micro-giving.

Recently featured on The Huffington Post, Philanthropy Daily and Social Media Today, Centscere is a social media donation platform created to make charitable giving simple, affordable and routine.

Centscere offers the chance to attach meaning to every social media action, and turn those actions into a charitable moment for non-profits like Light Work.

Sync your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts and attach monetary value to the actions you execute every day, like posting, retweeting or liking content. These actions become donations that go to directly to Light Work.

“We have people currently giving as little as $0.02 and as much as $1 per interaction,” says Ian Dickerson, Co-Founder. There are three separate actions that can be set to trigger a donation on your part: a Facebook post (including commenting, uploading a status and sharing a link), “liking” a post on Facebook, and tweeting or retweeting content on Twitter. Once the cumulative value of a user’s interactions reaches $7.99, a donation is made to his or her selected charity.

You can sign up and learn more here!

Light Work Lab is pleased to present our Instructor Profile series – featuring interviews with our workshop and class instructors. We want you to get to know them, their work and their interests.

Today we interview Penelope Singer who teaches both an Intro and Advanced Graphic Design class as well as a File Preparation workshop.

Penelope Singer is a graphic designer, jeweler, and instructor who lives in Central New York. For her, making things is like breathing—she’s been doing both for as long as she can remember. Both her jewelry and photography have been shown in the Everson Museum of Art. She currently works as graphic designer for the Syracuse University Libraries, teaches workshops on design programs and topics at Light Work, and creates art jewelry in her home studio.

LWL: What do you love about graphic design?

I love that graphic design can completely change the message and meaning of something. It has the power to influence how we think, what we buy and how much we’ll pay for it—even whether or not we trust our doctor.

Graphic design is non-verbal communication for words. It’s the body language, dress, style, and tone. It’s the smile or the tapping foot. It’s the character behind the message.

When you’re designing something, it’s like you’re giving someone a makeover. You’re given raw materials to work with and you have to delve in and understand the why—who is that person, what are their hopes and dreams, what do they stand for—and once you know that, you figure out what will make those things shine.

Graphic design is not just about making something look good—it’s about creating something that communicates effectively. Good design doesn’t call attention to itself; it calls attention to its content. It puts the focus on the message. That’s why design skills are so crucial—they give you more control over how your message is received.

I guess you could say that I love graphic design because I am a control freak.

LWL: Tell us about the file preparation workshop, where did you get the idea for it?

For years I’ve seen people struggle with the concept of pixels and file formats. I’ve seen people print out things and wonder why they look so bad when they “looked fine on my monitor.” The concept of pixels and digital image files isn’t easy. Pixels aren’t tangible; they’re not bound to a physical size. File formats are just as tricky. We can’t always see the difference between a JPG and a TIF unless we know what we’re looking at. The problem is that the world is starting to require that we understand these intangible things in order to thrive in any field.

I consistently see artists not submitting their artwork to exhibits and publications because they aren’t sure how to get images of their work into the appropriate size and file format that’s required. But it was one particular incident last year that birthed the idea for this workshop:

I’d seen a call for entries and was trying to get my friend and fellow jeweler Dana to enter a few of her pieces for publication in the newest Lark book “500 Necklaces.” I knew her work was good, and I knew she had lovely pictures of them already. When I told her, she seemed excited about it. A couple of weeks later I was working in the studio and realized that the deadline was the next day, so I called her up to see if she’d entered anything. I was probably procrastinating on finishing a project that evening. When I talked to her she sheepishly admitted she hadn’t submitted anything because she wasn’t sure if her image files were the right size and she didn’t know how to go about figuring it out. I told her, “Send me the files and I’ll get them all set for you. I want someone I know in that book.” There were just a few hours left, but she was able to get them submitted. A few months later she called me up excitedly. The book editors had contacted her and asked her more questions about her work! A few weeks later she found out she’d made it into the book. She still owes me lunch for that.

I see artists all the time making great work, but when they put it out in the digital world, it suffers—or it doesn’t get out there at all. Maybe it’s selfish, but I want to see more good art out in the world. That and less crappy JPGs.

LWL: Who should take your classes?

I think everyone should take my classes. At the very least I’m an amusing person—and I’m okay at being laughed at.

People who’ll get the most from my classes, however, are ones who are curious about the process. They want to get their hands in there and get dirty. Well, not literally dirty, but you know what I mean. They want to make something—and make it better than they have in the past.

I especially encourage all artists who know only limited information about digital image files to take the File Prep class. Knowing how to get the right size and format file—that looks as good as the original, ginormous one—is crucial in getting noticed. You can have beautiful work and a photograph of that work, but if it’s not a good quality image file, you’re limiting your chances of success.

Introduction to Graphic and Layout Design
March 10 – March 31, 2014 / Mondays, 6-9pm
Skill level: Beginner / Intermediate

Professional Practice: Preparing Files
April 6, 2014 / Sunday 1-4pm
Skill level: Beginner

Advanced Graphic and Layout Design
April 28 – May 19, 2014 / Mondays, 6-9pm
Skill level: Intermediate / Advanced

Register for Penelope’s class at www.lightwork.org/workshops