Behind the Lens 2023:
Everything is Different, or Six Degrees…
Each year the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts celebrates Women’s History Month by hosting or curating an exhibition featuring women artists exploring photography in their practice. The series focuses exclusively on women behind the camera, rather than those objectified by it, and is presented as part of our mission to promote and celebrate diversity, be it in technique, area of interest, presentation, perspective or other…
This year’s exhibition brings together selections of work from Emily Belz, Brooke Hammerle, Fruma Markowitz, Shelby Meyerhoff, Laurie Peek & Jean Schnell. At first glance the work selected and the artists who made it appear to have little in common other than perhaps, talent, a curious mind and a strong visual sensibility. As we start 2023, we encourage you to look at this exhibition, and your world a little deeper, things that look different on the surface are often more closely connected under the skin and just because something looks different doesn’t mean it is…
We hope in celebrating these assembled photographers you leave informed, inspired, or at least surprised by the work presented…
Join us: Artist Talk/Round Table: on Zoom February, 28th 6:30-8:00pm
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this artist talk, videos of the individual presentations are included with each artist’s statement.
This exhibition features: Selections from ongoing projects by Emily Belz, Brooke Hammerle, Fruma Markowitz, Shelby Meyerhoff, Laurie Peek & Jean Schnell to present six different approaches to photographic practice and how photographs speak.
From the Curator:
For this sixth annual celebration of Women’s History month at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, I have selected six women artists from work viewed at portfolio reviews or entered in previous calls for entries, to present in this invitational exhibition.
This spotlight on women behind the camera, brings together photographers with a variety of backgrounds and areas of interest, who have charted diverging practices and career paths to create an exhibition that, as a whole, is diverse and possibly even discordant by design. In the work presented, we see that light can illuminate, it can obscure or it can be the subject itself. A photograph can inform, it can question and it can fool the eye.
In a shrinking world, Everything is Different seemed an appropriate title under which to hang six very divergent bodies of work in celebration of Women’s History Month. On the surface, and taken literally, the title expresses the obvious, there is no visual thread connecting these artists. Underneath that superficial interpretation, the title was appropriated from a collection of short stories published in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy, which first presented the idea that “due to a shrinking world any two individuals could be connected through, at most five acquaintances.” This concept, now more popularly referred to as “Six Degrees of Separation”, also provides another important and perhaps more relevant way to think about the work presented…
What ties these photographers together is their innovative use of a photographic processes to realize a desire to communicate an idea visually. Beyond that, I’ll leave it to viewer to decide what roll gender plays, if any, in the work or ideas presented. The exhibition was not curated to be a cohesive collection, nor does it attempt to impose an external narrative over these individual explorations, but allows each body of work stand on its own. My intention was to celebrate the unique talents of the artists included and the inherent diversity of the human condition.
– David DeMelim, Managing Director
Behind the Lens 2023:
Everything is Different, or Six Degrees…
Emily Belz, Brooke Hammerle, Fruma Markowitz,
Shelby Meyerhoff, Laurie Peek & Jean Schnell
Exhibition: Thursday, February 16th, thru Friday, March 10th, 2023
Opening Reception: February 16h 5:00 – 8:00pm
The exhibition catalog is available and can be ordered here for home delivery or you can pick up a copy in the gallery.
Take a virtual tour of the gallery in full 360˚
Emily Belz: Year One
About: Emily Belz
Emily Belz is an independent photographer, educator, and curator based in Lincoln, MA. Her photographs focus on domestic still lifes, telling stories through the traces, objects, and slants of light that have been left behind. Belz has exhibited her photographs widely in both solo and group exhibitions at venues including Gallery Kayafas, the Danforth Museum, and the Newport Art Museum. She is represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston and will have a solo exhibition of her work there in February 2023.
Belz holds a BA in photography and art history from Hampshire College (1997); an MA in community-based art education from the Rhode Island School of Design (2009); and an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art (2017). She teaches classes and workshops at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) and the deCordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), and is on the faculty at Lasell University (Newton, MA). Belz works privately with artists as a mentor, and specializes in reviewing and sequencing portfolios.
With 20+ years in the art world, Belz brings this experience to her role as juror for photography competitions, and as a reviewer for regional portfolio reviews. She enjoys curating exhibitions in collaboration with emerging artists in the Boston area.
Artist Statement: Year One
My family left the city in the summer of 2019. Since that time, I have been photographing our home and the land it sits on, which for generations had belonged to the same family. Two of the brothers are now our neighbors. Parents, children, and grandparents have been born on, gotten married and died on this land—it’s full of stories, that while not my own, now rest in the space where my own family stories are being made. In Year One, the first photographic series I undertook after our move, I explore this narrative co-mingling in multi-panel images, working through the idea of what it means to intertwine family histories. Stories from the past reverberate with the present and form the foundation of these frames.
– Emily Belz
Brooke Hammerle: Songs of Light
About: Brooke Hammerle
Brooke lives and works in Providence, having spent her professional photographic career working as photographer for the departments of Art, Visual Arts, History of Art, and the Bell Gallery at Brown University. With a BFA from The University Without Walls Brooke has a background in the artsã having studied Fine Arts, Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Art History, and Sculpture at RISD, University of Hawaii, Art Students League, Accademia De Belle Arte, Florence, Italy and American University in Washington, D.C. Hammerle brings a painter’s approach and esthetic to her work abandoning the formal and technical restrictions of career spent documenting the work of others for publication. Much of her work, including the series presented here, explores light not for its ability to illuminate but as an element, an active presence to be experienced and captured.
Artist Statement: Songs of Light
In Songs of Light my vision of “light” has evolved… light is less about color space than an element in its own right. It’s reflections become a form of energy moving through water. Aesthetically, similarly to earlier landscape work, I am in search of a unity, the subtlety of shapes and patterns floating in a rhythm of their own space and time, the poetry of nature’s design.
My vision in photography came through a background in painting. The camera opened the door to the space of the visual world illuminated by that mysterious, mercurial, and magical “Light”. My work belongs to photography in that the image is a moment in time created by light captured through a lens. But through my experience as a painter the camera becomes a tool in reimagining photography’s traditional elements.
The visual experience of light is my source of inspiration. In my earlier work, the elements of points of focus and depth of field became sublimated into the more plastic elements of color space, and a balance between nature and abstraction. Through reflections in water I explore hidden worlds of multiple dimensions and spatial ambiguity between surface and reflections. In my more recent work, light becomes a participant… my intent to capture the sensation of “being there” light becomes a moving element.
– Brooke Hammerle
Fruma Markowitz: Searching for the Kahinah
About: Fruma Markowitz
Fruma has always been fascinated by what her childhood self called “the olden days.” Spellbound by faded sepia portraits of family members she had never met, and hearing her parents’ stories about escaping pogroms and poverty, she acquired an acute sensitivity to human suffering, alongside a deep awareness of the way time works to both elucidate and obscure human experience. Photography, as a so-called “time-based art” became the perfect medium for her to create her own visual interpretation of time. Her father put a Kodak Brownie camera in her hands when she was seven, and she was hooked forever.
Today, her photography practice focuses on historical, experimental and hand-made processes, with an emphasis on cyanotype, collage and lumen works. Family life, womanhood, cultural history, memory and shared legacies are where she mostly draws inspiration for making images.
Fruma was a member of the first graduating class to earn a BFA in photography at the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design in Jerusalem, Israel, and worked as a commercial photographer and photography teacher in Tel Aviv. She currently lives in Bridgeport, CT and her work has been shown nationally at the SoHo Photo Gallery in NYC, the New York Center for Photographic Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Southeast Center for Photography, Light ArtSpace Gallery and Remarque Print Gallery in New Mexico.
Artist Statement: Searching for the Kahinah
Searching for the Kahinah is part travelogue, part archive, part fact, part flight of fancy, but mostly a visual journey through the many interwoven narratives comprising a unique fluidity of culture and tradition characteristic of women in the Maghreb (North Africa). During my own travels in Morocco I learned how Jewish, Arab Muslim, and Amazigh (Berber) women shared a confluence of stories and myths, religious belief and practice, designs in personal adornment and handcraft for centuries. I became intrigued. Because it’s quite remarkable, and so utterly inspiring, that people we in the West consider at odds with one another, in fact lived side-by-side with respect for years, mostly due to the women amongst them who made it so. This concept is foundational to my project.
The work draws additional inspiration and imagery from a vast archive of photographic postcards dating from the turn of the 20th Century.
– Fruma Markowitz
Shelby Meyerhoff: Zoomorphics
About: Shelby Meyerhoff
Shelby Meyerhoff is a multidisciplinary artist based in Winchester, Massachusetts. Her recent exhibits include solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography (MA) and the Concord Free Public Library (MA), and a two-person show at the Hopkins Center for the Arts (MN). Photographs from her Zoomorphics series have also been exhibited at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (GA), the Attleboro Arts Museum (MA), the Mattatuck Museum (CT), and the LH Horton Jr. Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (CA). Her work has been featured in Harvard Magazine, Fraction Magazine, A Photo Editor, What Will You Remember?, and UU World.
Meyerhoff has studied visual arts at the Griffin Museum, the New England School of Photography, and MassArt. She holds a B.A. in the Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard College and a M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. She lives near the Middlesex Fells, a 2,575-acre nature reservation, and draws much of her inspiration from the plants, animals, and other species found in her local area. Before becoming a fine artist, Meyerhoff worked in nonprofit communications, promoting environmental initiatives.
She is also an educator, with a focus on arts and nature programming. Meyerhoff has taught children from preschool to 8th grade, through the Arlington Center for the Arts, the Umbrella Arts Center, the Concord Free Public Library, the Friends of the Middlesex Fells Reservation, the Great River Outdoor Summer Program, and Ready Set Kids. She enjoys sharing Zoomorphics with viewers of all ages.
.
Artist Statement: Zoomorphics
In Zoomorphics, I paint my face and body, and photograph myself as creatures inspired by the natural world. The resulting images draw attention to our interconnection with all living things.
Through my work, I explore both the joy and the vulnerability that come with being alive on this planet. Zoomorphics is not only about radical empathy for other species, but about recognizing our commonalities and our shared peril in a time of environmental destruction. In the midst of climate change and other crises, humans are not only a threat to life on earth, but also an integral part of the solution.
While some of the creatures alluded to in my work are from faraway places, others are inspired by what I encounter on my walks in the woods near my home. Being present to our surrounding ecosystems, and all that lives within them, is an important part of my practice and message. Zoomorphics is not a eulogy. It’s a call to engagement, to being in nature and celebrating our place within it, and to protecting what remains.
– Shelby Myerhoff
Laurie Peek: Car Parts
About: Laurie Peek
A practicing fine art and documentary photographer for over twenty-five years, Peek’s experience in photography is deep. This includes a residency at Apeiron Workshops, staff position at the George Eastman House Museum of Photography, an MFA in Photography from Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo; working as a photo librarian for the Bettmann Archive (now Getty Images) and Sygma Photo News; photojournalist (The Brooklyn Paper, Village Voice, City Limits, The Progressive); staff photographer for NYC’s Dept. of General Services; PR photographer for national political campaigns; and gallery manager for the Art Students League Vytlacil campus.
For the past decade Peek has been exhibiting her photography widely across the US and Internationally. Recent solo shows include: Flowers Everywhere, Davis-Orton Gallery, Hudson, NY; Car Parts: Metallic Transports, Union Arts Center, Sparkill, NY; and Rockland Reverso, Rockland Center for the Arts, W. Nyack, NY.
Peek resides with her husband just “upstate” of NYC where she relishes the beauty of the Hudson Valley.
Artist Statement: Car Parts
I started my series “Car Parts” as an extension of my “Wet” series of abstract patterns and reflections on water. Noticing similar reflections on cars, these fleeting images demanded my attention. Creating photographs that combine the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism with the bright colors of Pop art, I employ the metallic surfaces as canvases for my abstract photographic “paintings.”
Cropping in, I isolate the reflections, scrapes and play of light. Removing their usual context, I re-create the images as mysterious, refracted realities. Finding these overlooked gems along the street, in ugly parking lots, shopping centers and strip malls is, for me, a redemptive act that reveals beauty in the banal and re-examines our relationship to the automobile and its environs.
– Laurie Peek
Jean Schnell: The Light Within
About: Jean Schnell
Jean is an emerging fine art photographer and was a Critical Mass finalist in 2017. After a career as a nurse and a health coach, she has immersed herself in photography and an extended exploration of Quaker meetinghouses, Quaker Meeting and by extension an exploration of Light, both the inner light and the light we can see. Light, the light within or Inner light is as central to Quaker faith as the light that forms a photograph. Light is central to Jean’s work and in many cases it is the subject.
The work presented here draws from three separate portfolios, each an exploration of a portion of the Quaker experience that started with a desire to document all the active meeting houses. Collectively the selection of work presented here draws these explorations together to present an introduction or overview of Quakerism and to present light as Subject.
Her Quaker meetinghouse photographs have been featured in Lenswork and Yankee Magazines. Along with numerous gallery exhibitions, the Friends Journal published her article “Framing the Light: Quaker Meetinghouses as Space and Spirit” accompanied by her photographs.
Artist Statement: The Light Within
I grew up as a Quaker. Quaker beliefs and practice are embedded deep within me and have had a profound influence on my life and on my journey as a photographer. In three portfolios of Quaker work, “Framing the Light,””Framing the Silence,”and “Ocean of Light,” I have explored the Quaker beliefs of the Light and the practice of silent Quaker worship.
The Light Within, or the Inner Light, is a key Quaker belief that “there is that of God in everyone.” A Quaker Meeting for Worship is a silent, expectant waiting upon the Light Within. Quaker silence is not an emptiness but a disciplined and contemplative openness to the Spirit of God. I use a meditative approach to photographing, similar to Quaker worship. After meditation, photographing is a quiet, reflective, and serene process.
“Framing the Light” was started in 2014. These photographs chronicle Quaker meetinghouses from colonial to modern times. As I worked in these buildings I always paid attention to the light. As I worked throughout the day, the light would travel around the space illuminating the benches, walls, and floors in various ways. This attention to the physical light mirrors the attention given to seeking the Light Within in Quaker worship. The end result is a feeling of sanctuary enriched with serenity, clarity, and hope.
“Framing the Silence” was a collaborative effort with Framingham Friends Meeting. I was permitted to photograph during the sacred silence of Quaker worship. The photographs combined with words offer insight into the strength and depth of this living Quaker community.
“Ocean of Light” was completed during the pandemic. These photographs were carefully chosen from the Quaker meetinghouse series to illustrate the words of George Fox, founder of Quakerism. His words gave me hope in a dark time: I saw, also, that there was an ocean of darkness and death but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.”
– Jean Schnell
Behind the Lens 2023:
Everything is Different, or Six Degrees…
This exhibition features: Emily Belz, Brooke Hammerle, Fruma Markowitz,
Shelby Meyerhoff, Laurie Peek & Jean Schnell
Exhibition: Thursday, February 16th, thru Friday, March 10th, 2023
Opening Reception: February 16h 5:00 – 8:00pm
Artist Talk/Round Table: Zoom details TBD
The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, 118 N. Main St. Providence, RI
Located in the heart of Providence, RICPA was founded to inspire creative development and provide opportunities to engage with the community through exhibitions, education, publication, and mutual support.
RICPA exists to create a diverse and supportive community for individuals interested in learning or working in the Photographic Arts. We strive to provide an environment conducive to the free exchange of ideas in an open and cooperative space. Members should share a passion for creating, appreciating, or learning about all forms of photo-based media. We work to provide a platform for artistic expression, that fosters dialogue and drives innovation in the photographic arts.
The Gallery at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts is a member of Gallery Night Providence https://www.gallerynight.org/
Want to become a RICPA Member? Membership brings many benefits and discounts, for more information and to find the membership level that fits you, visit our website at https://www.riphotocenter.org/membership-info/ You may become a member at entry, member benefits begin immediately and run 365 days from your start date.
Questions: Contact gallery@riphotocenter.org To learn about other RICPA exhibits and programs, visit https://www.riphotocenter.org/.
Leave a Reply