June 23 - July 23, 2017
Kristine Thompson and Johanna Warwick – "We Live in the Gaps Between the Stories"
Photograms and Digital Photographs
Frable Gallery
Opening Reception for the Artists
Friday, June 23, 2017
7:00-10:00 pm
Free and Open to the Public
Closing Artist Talk
Sunday, July 23, 2017
2:00 pm
Free and Open to the Public
Kristine Thompson Artist Statement
My work considers how contemporary photographic imagery circulates and often addresses social and emotional responses to representations of death and mourning. I bring references from different historical periods into a shared visual space in order to initiate a conversation between the past and the present, to imagine a tactile connection or relationship with people who are no longer around, and to question how photographs might elicit empathy.
Images Seen to Images Felt is an on-going series of photograms that I make by pressing light-sensitive gelatin silver print paper up to my laptop screen in the darkroom. They are direct impressions of digital images that I have collected from a range of online news sources. I turn these virtual images into tangible ones to facilitate a slowed-down way of considering difficult, contemporary events. Collectively, these photograms become an archive of loss. The amount of pressure that I apply as the paper makes contact with the screen determines whether the elements in the photo appear crisp or more ghostly. These prints range in scale – from 2"x3" to 11"x14"; the scale is based on the size of the images as they appeared when viewed in the original news story. In some cases, I leave the photograph in negative form; in others, I use the paper negative to make a positive print so that the information is more legible. I install these prints in clustered groupings so that formal and emotional connections can be made between images that might not otherwise be considered in the same context. Each installation is scaled/tailored to the gallery in which it is displayed and the group of prints is supplemented to reflect current events.
More at www.kristinethompson.com
Johanna Warwick Artist Statement
In Monuments to Strangers I photograph half-tone printing blocks as an exploration of our history, both cultural and photographic. These blocks were made by a photomechanical process to reproduce photographs for publication between the 1880s and 1960s. This invention came from the father of photography, Fox Talbot and was the first time in history images of reality could be reproduced on presses reaching the public, rather than an image interpreted and altered by hand. While in use for over 80 years, it was an imperfect process that eventually was made redundant by offset printing in the 1960s.
The figures in the blocks are unknown, but they were significant enough to have their image produced in this way. The images reveal how versions of history were presented publicly. I photograph to highlight how women and minorities were vastly under represented, and in re-presenting these images hope to reveal and question our flawed history.
Today these blocks have no use; they have become antiquated, much like the newspapers that they were once printed in. My photographs are several iterations of light sensitive materials being exposed; the original photograph, the re-photographed negative, the photomechanical produced block, and my exposure. Each image thus goes from a positive, to a negative, recorded once again as a negative, then inverted to a positive. It is in this long chain of events, which traverses over decades, that the glow of light and color occurs. The photographs describe the history of representation in American daily newspapers, as well as the history of photography and reveal contemporary practice at the same time.
More at www.johannawarwick.com
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