Light Work is pleased to announce the exhibition The Other New York: 2012, featuring the photographic work of Sarah Averill, Bang-Geul Han, Mark McLoughlin, Jan Nagle, and Matthew Walker. This exhibition is part of a community-wide, multi-venue biennial exhibition that is the result of a major collaborion among fourteen art organizations in Syracuse. This ambitious project aims to highlight the rich talent of artists across Upstate New York, with a special focus on Central New York and the surrounding counties.

TONY: 2012 is organized by the Everson Museum of Art in collaboration with ArtRage—The Norton Putter Gallery, Community Folk Art Center, Erie Canal Museum, Light Work, Onondaga Historical Association, PuntodeContacto/Point of Contact, Rosamond Gifford Zoo, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, SUArt Galleries, Urban Video Project, The Warehouse Gallery, City of Syracuse and XL Projects. Major funding is provided by The Central New York Community Foundation through the John F. Marsellus Fund.

For more information on gallery talks, tours, artist lectures, receptions, YouTube interviews, online activities, and venue maps please visit www.everson.org

Sarah Averill

For one evening in May 2011, artist, physician and community activist Sarah Averill turned a laundromat on the north side of Syracuse into a gallery and lively community event. The Lodi Street Laundromat is located in the heart of the north side, a neighborhood largely populated by immigrant families from Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, and Vietnam. While in medical school Averill sought to keep her creative spirit alive by walking the streets of the north side and interacting with and photographing this diverse community. Averill’s background in fine arts and urban planning came together in this project as she set up her camera and printer at the laundromat for a “Free Friends and Family Day,” where patrons and neighbors could have their portraits taken while doing their laundry. These events culminated in an installation at the laundromat of photographs of hundreds of immigrant families and a reception with food and music provided by families from Burma and Somalia. For TONY 2012 Averill has reinstalled her photos at Light Work, which continue to provide a true celebration of community.

Bang-Geul Han

Bang-Geul Han works in a variety of media, including watercolor, digital video, photography, performance, and computer programming. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Han moved to the US in 2003, and creates work in response to this experience as well as the coinciding explosion of new media and communication platforms such as blogs, social media, and reality TV. She is interested in exploring, “how we (and especially myself) engage with these new forms and how the contemporary narratives are constructed from these disembodied environments where conflicting impulses of public and private, anxiety and desire are blurred.”

Mark McLoughlin

Mark McLoughlin’s series of portraits, Stolen Souls, Willing, were created using a large pinhole camera without a lens, constructed by the artist, which accommodates a 16 x 20” paper negative. As each model sat for the fifteen minute exposure time required, they could not help but contribute to the destruction of their likeness, as perfect stillness is impossible and the long exposure time records every movement. But within this process the artist also discovered his models left behind what he describes as a notion of the spirit, reminding him of the belief that the act of taking someone’s photograph would steal that person’s soul.

Jan Nagle

Following the deaths of both her father and cat in the spring of 2010, multi-disciplinary artist Jan Nagle began to take weekly drives through the landscape of Niagara County and Lake Ontario. The open road provided her with a way to filter her memories and process her grief. In her words, “Personal loss is a marker; from such a point, we either suck up inside ourselves and die a little bit, or we pivot into a new period of our lives. Either way, there is a time of mourning, followed some way, someday, by grace, by acceptance, and ultimately by celebration or tribute.” Vaulted is a series of twenty TTV photographs, which were created during this period.

Matthew Walker

Recollection is a series of photographs by Matthew Walker taken at the State University of New York College of Brockport and in the community of Brockport, NY. The project was funded in part by a commission for the College’s 175th Anniversary celebration and also through an artist residency at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. Although Walker is an alumnus of the college, he stresses the photographs are not a record of his personal experience but “speak to the potential and limitations of memory, and acknowledges that location stands as a testament to the passage of time.”