Behind the Lens 2024:
Documents from the 21st Century…
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 from six projects highlighting strong visual storytelling and a willingness to explore new forms and new tools. As we start 2024, we encourage you to look at this exhibition, and your world a little more closely, things that appear simple on the surface are often far more complex when examined closely and approached as more than a soundbite. This exhibition brings together a cross-section of photographic styles and techniques to present an array of photographic explorations with something for everyone. We hope in celebrating these assembled photographers you leave informed, inspired, or at least surprised by the work presented…
This exhibition features: Selections from ongoing projects by Sage Brousseau, Lana Z Caplan, Tresha Glenister, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Marcy Juran and Susan Keiser. to present six different approaches to photographic practice and how photographs can speak to us.
From the Curator:
For this seventh annual celebration of Women’s History month at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, I have selected six women artists primarily 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.
Discord may be the buzzword for 2024. Progress in these early stages of the 21st Century can be difficult to quantify and finding an appropriate yardstick, or metric to gauge progress daunting at best. Advances in one field seem to be eclipsed by backpedaling in another, concepts we thought fixed are found to malleable. As the reduction of complex issues into soundbites serves not to inform opinions, but to polarize them, we take a step back to present six thoughtfully crafted bodies of work. They are selections from larger projects and serve to tease and challenge the viewer. Each artist has reached beyond the soundbite, the easy solution, to dig a little deeper and produced a more thoughtful and nuanced exploration of their given topic. I have brought together these bodies of work, some personal, some political, some more experimental, as a way to document this moment in time. My hope was to provide a snapshot of the range of topics, techniques and thinking currently being explored. Each project is a unique expression of the challenges we all face and unique creation of the individual women behind the lens. This exhibition is presented to honor their efforts and mark the time we are living in.
Presented here are six projects/stories to inform, to challenge and to shine a light on the human experience. The issues presented may be universal or unique to the early 21st century. What connects these photographers together is their innovative use of photographic processes to realize their desire to communicate an idea visually. Beyond that, as always, I’ll leave it to the viewer to decide what roll gender plays, if any, in the work or ideas presented. 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 2024:
Documents from the 21st Century…
Sage Brousseau, Lana Z. Caplan, Tresha Glenister, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Marcy Juran and Susan Keiser
Exhibition: Thursday, February 15th, thru Friday, March 15th, 2024
Opening Reception: February 15th 5:00 – 8:00pm
View the exhibition in this 360˚ virtual self guided walkthrough
Sage Brousseau: Thresholds
About: Sage Brousseau
Born and raised in the Boston-area, Sage Brousseau is an artist and educator who explores story, place, and identity as the foundation of personal history. Her recent projects investigate traces of memory and contemplate emotion and loss through the lens of shared female experience.
Her photography is exhibited regularly in local and regional venues including a 2021 solo exhibition of her series What’s Left Behind at The Griffin Museum of Photography. In 2021, she was also a Photolucida Critical Mass finalist. Sage received her M.Ed. from Lesley University and her BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Artist Statement: Thresholds
A threshold takes you from one place into another. Using the past as a point of reference for navigating and giving meaning to the present, these photographs follow journeys of change and loss where the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural become blurred. They travel through periods of transition from childhood to adolescence/adulthood, seeking to render the intangible yearning I feel for lost places– both physical and emotional– to which I am unable to return. Some images are deeply personal and specific, others universally relatable, all of them offering a point of entry, inviting the viewer in as a witness, provoking personal associations.
– Sage Brousseau
Lana Z Caplan: OCEANO (for Seven Generations)
About: Lana Z Caplan
Often inspired by notions of utopia, where one person’s utopia is another’s undoing, Lana Z Caplan is a photographer and filmmaker based in California.
Her exhibition record includes Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Everson Museum of Art, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico City, National Gallery of Art Puerto Rico, Griffin Museum of Photography, and numerous national and international film festivals. Her monograph, Oceano (for seven generations) was published by Kehrer Verlag in late fall of 2023.
Caplan earned a BA in Art History and BS in Psychology from Boston University and MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art. After many years in Boston and then Brooklyn, Caplan moved to Southern California in 2014 and is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Video at California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Lana Z Caplan is represented by:
Gallery NAGA, Boston
Artist Statement: OCEANO (for Seven Generations)
OCEANO (for seven generations), looks both back and to the future, in images and text, to describe histories and conflicts that question legacies of colonization, photographic history, utopian ideology, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.
These are the dunes of Edward Weston’s iconic photos; of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 buried movie set for The Ten Commandments; of the Dunites – the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics who lived in dune shacks from the 1920s to the 40s – hosts to Weston during shooting trips; and fundamentally, of the native Chumash. These dunes now host a landscape of ATVs, inciting a decade-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality. Lana Z Caplan attended Air Pollution Control District hearings, met with historians, scoured archives, and collaborated with yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribal leadership to excavate these histories in images
– Lana Z Caplan
Full Artist statement…
Books are available in the gallery or for home delivery, click the photo below to order your copy.
Tresha Glenister: Matchmaking
About: Tresha Glenister
Tresha Glenister is a fine art photographer newly based in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Savannah, Georgia, but completed her BFA in Graphic Design at Georgia State University. She remained in Atlanta after college enjoying the vibrant arts community, but missed the architectural charm of Savannah and the sand beneath her toes. In the historic city of Providence, she’s found the perfect marriage of coastal and city living. Tresha is excited to be living in the creative capital with an abundance of opportunities to grow as an artist while enjoying a new phenomenon called winter.
Tresha is a self-proclaimed professional dabbler, having worked in a comedy club, a photography gallery, and corporate finance — all of which have influenced her eclectic portfolio to various degrees. Tresha has exhibited in private and non-profit galleries around the southeast, as well as the occasional festival. Her work has been purchased for private collection and for a major motion picture.
Artist Statement: Matchmaking
I always enjoyed matching card games when I was growing up. It brought such a sense of victory in flipping over that matching yellow sunflower or the red apple with a worm. Equally satisfying was finishing a Rubik’s Cube in 1 minute, 37 seconds (yes, I’m bragging) and having all the little squares neatly line up on color coordinated panels.
I feel the same sort of challenge and satisfaction in composing diptychs. I constantly collect images on my phone, building this vast library of potential matches. It’s particularly rewarding to take a shot and suddenly remember another matching image that’s a year or so older. Or to suddenly construct a match in my head. And just like the Rubik’s Cube, they line up in orderly little blocks as they neatly click into place.
– Tresha Glenister
Diana Nicholette Jeon: Cake (AI-Mediated Post-Photography)
About: Diana Nicholette Jeon
Diana Nicholette Jeon’s internationally exhibited work explores universal themes of loss, dreams, memory, and female identity via metaphor and personal narrative. Solo exhibitions include the Honolulu Museum of Art (HI), Griffin Museum of Photography (MA); Blue Sky Gallery (OR); Garage Gallery (NY), 2022 HeadOn Photo Festival, Disorder Gallery (Sydney AU) A Smith Gallery (TX) and Kirsch Gallery (HI). Her work was a Semi-Finalist in the 2023 HeadOn Portrait Awards, Finalist in the 2021 HeadOn Landscape Photo Awards, Finalist in the 2022 and Juror’s Pick in the 2020 Lens Culture B+W Photo Awards, a four-time Critical Mass Finalist, and Overall Winner of the 11th Julia Margaret Cameron Award, among others. Jeon’s art is held in public and private collections worldwide, including four works in the permanent collection of the State of Hawai’i. Jeon writes about photography for OneTwelve Publications and FRAMES magazine. She holds an MFA in Imaging and Digital Art from UMBC and resides in Honolulu, HI with her husband and son.
Artist Statement: Cake
CAKE is a visual journey into the hearts and minds of American women. It reveals our fierce resilience and inner vulnerability amidst a landscape marked by shifting cultural norms and systemic inequalities.
In June 2022, Supreme Court justices, several selected by a misogynistic President, now an adjudicated rapist, put the final nail in Roe v Wade’s coffin. Women in present day America have become the first generation with fewer autonomous rights than our mothers and grandmothers had.
In 1765, Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the phrase “Let them eat cake.” Today, the term commonly references a frivolous disregard for another’s plight. The current Republican war on women has led to the unthinkable: women being denied life- saving and compassionate reproductive care, endangering our lives and future child-bearing abilities. As tone-deaf politicos cruelly continue working to create national bans and criminalize both providers of and women seeking reproductive care, my head hears only the “cake” speech. What year is this?
The imaginary women I have conjured using AI are stand-ins for every woman engaged in the battle against these new and distressing societal restrictions. Each is a visual testament to our hearts, minds, and untold disenchantment stories. CAKE serves to initiate further dialogue, asking viewers to question minority, evangelically- driven court rulings that inflict pain on the experience of American women today while serving as a call to action for viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and advocate for a more inclusive and equitable future.
– Diana Nicholette Jeon
Marcy Juran: Myth, Memory and Violets
About: Marcy Juran
Marcy Juran is a visual artist with a practice that includes photography, encaustic and handmade paper. Juran combines personal narratives with the natural environs of her native New England, exploring themes of myth, memory and legacy, often in relationship to botanical imagery. Her work in photography began at Cranbrook Academy of Art, as part of her graduate study in graphic design. Throughout her career in design, she collaborated with numerous photographers, creating award-winning work strongly grounded in photographic storytelling.
Her work has been recognized both internationally and in the US, and exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography (MA), and the Soho Photo Gallery (NY), as well as juried and invitational shows at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (ME), Sohn Fine Art (MA), the Center for Photographic Art (CA), the Davis Orton Gallery (NY), the SE Center for Photography (SC), PhotoPlace (VT), and the A Smith Gallery (TX), as well as many regional galleries in New England. In 2021, her body of work Family Passage was selected for honors in the exhibition 30 OVER 50 | In Context at the Center for Fine Art Photography (CO) by juror Arnika Dawkins, as well as being awarded First Place in the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for Digital Manipulation & Collage (series). Her work has been published in the publications Fraction, Lenscratch and Don‘t Take Pictures, and recently featured in OneTwelve and FRAMES. Her book, SALTMARSH SEASONS, was selected for inclusion in the Eighth Annual Self-published Photobook Show at the Davis Orton Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography.
.
Artist Statement: Myth, Memory and Violets
Meadow. Woods. Rippling brook.
Sound. Shore. Tideline.
I am firmly grounded in the New England landscape I have known since childhood. Growing up as an introvert in a family of extroverts, my refuge was a field of hay and wildflowers just beyond my backyard – a place to read, write, and daydream as I navigated my circle of family and friends. The wildness of the nearby meadows, woods, and brook were a welcome counterpart to the sameness and repetition of my post-WWII suburban neighborhood.
My current work examines myth and memory, combining my images of that closely observed natural world with personal and vintage photos and treasures. This
re-imagining explores fragments of time, using a visual vocabulary drawn from field and forest, skies and shore.
Jingles. Bubbles. Fireflies.
Mythic magic above our heads, and below our feet.
And always, always, violets.
–Marcy Juran
Susan Keiser: Undertow
About: Susan Keiser
Susan Keiser is a fine art photographer working at the intersection of dreams and memories, abstract and conceptual ideas. Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of galleries, museums, and art fairs both here and abroad, including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Greater Boston Stage Company, Stoneham, MA; Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY; Baum Gallery, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AK; Catalyst Gallery, Beacon, NY; and Anchorlight Gallery, Raleigh, NC.
Group shows include the Berlin Foto Biennale; Keyhole Art Fair, Murcia Spain; PH21 Gallery, Budapest; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; Candela Books + Gallery, Richmond, VA; Beard Gallery, SUNY, Cortland; Fairfield Museum and History Center, Fairfield, CT, New York Center for Photographic Art, New York, NY.
She attended Pomona College and holds a BFA in painting from The Cooper Union and a diploma from The New York Botanical Garden School of Professional Horticulture. She is the co-founder and co-curator of Garage Gallery, Beacon, New York.
Artist Statement: Undertow
I work with a family of dolls mass-produced in the 1950s—the embodiment of an idealized middle-class culture, now relegated to attics and tag sales. While only four inches tall, they have power beyond their size. Once models of conformity, years of handling have worn away their veneer of polite reserve and privilege, and the contrast between their formal clothing and scarred bodies is both poignant and symbolic. Their distress embodies the sad truth of the era in which they were made, and that dichotomy between perfectly curated public lives vs. private lives filled with anger, confusion, and despair, is becoming increasingly relevant today.
The Fifties are now romanticized as a simpler, more prosperous time of happy housewives and backyard barbecues. But beneath the stoic façades, discontent grew and conflicts festered, until finally erupting into the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and women’s movements of the Sixties. Today we can scroll through endless social media feeds portraying the “good” life, while these same issues are at the forefront of our contentious politics and growing societal unrest. While some seek a return to that mistakenly mythologized post-war era, there was no safety, clarity, or surpassing morality then, and the drive to somehow get back there is one of the major forces now propelling us into a dark and unsure future.
Undertow is my ongoing, interlocking series of portfolios comprising complex images that address both individual and cultural histories and concerns. Working outdoors, following the seasons, water animates my work as it animates all life. Whether liquid or frozen, in droplets or ponds, it serves as both metaphor and lens. Worn remnants of plastic are transformed when fractured through panes of ice, reflected in liquid windows, or swathed in sodden paper or petals. Intuitive, improvised, my photographs are created entirely in-camera, in available light.
Beneath roiling currents and breaking waves, the undertow takes us down to where the truth lies.
– Susan Keiser
Behind the Lens 2024:
Documents for the 21st Century…
This exhibition features: Sage Brousseau, Lana Z Caplan, Tresha Glenister, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Marcy Juran, and Susan Keiser
Exhibition: Thursday, February 15th, thru Friday, March 15th, 2024
Opening Reception: February 15th 5:00 – 8:00pm
Artist Talk/Round Table: On Zoom, March 7th
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