The Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts is celebrating Women’s History month, and for 2025, we have invited the artists we featured in 2020, back for an update and a look at where they are now. In 2020 I invited five early career women to participate in that year’s annual spotlight on women working behind the camera, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. The assembled photographers, ranged from high school age to recently retired were invited with the intention of inviting them back. While the goal was to present a snapshot of current practice, our vision was to follow up with a series of updates as their career’s and practice developed over time. This exhibition is the next in the series, and revisits this same group of artists, five years down the road. What follows is both a look back, and a look at where they are in 2025… and we plan to check back to see where they go from here.
Behind the Lens: 2020 featured: Grace Marie Dewitt, Deb Ehrens, Molly Lamb, Zena Tadmoury & Jess Voas
We are happy to be able to invite them back for this exhibition, and want to thank them for coming back after the rough start to the series. With the arrival of COVID-19, we were not able to host an opening reception, and instead extended through October, 2020. Along the way we created a series of online exhibitions and featured a wider selection photographers to support and supplement our celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment… and re-presented it in 2021, virtually in the as part of our Behind the Lens: 2021 experience.
Grace Marie DeWitt
About: Grace Marie DeWitt
Grace Marie DeWitt is an interdisciplinary artist and arts coordinator in the DC-area. Grace’s recent work focuses on projection mapping and analog forms of glitch. At the base of her practice is an intrigue with tangible and intangible material, preciousness, and dissolution. Outside of her studio, grace is the associate of national and international programming at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where she works on the museum’s Women to Watch contemporary exhibition survey.
Artist Statement: shedding ouroboros (whether the whole is the same as its parts)
I’m compelled to believe that all things, living and nonliving, are part of a great thriving and great coping in this life. Much of my work involves admiring the impressionable nature of ephemeral materials specifically. My sympathy for these materials and their archival capacities––as well as their unexpected or even humorous contributions to the common story of existence––helps me process ideas related to mortality, inevitability, and humility.
shedding ouroboros (whether the whole is the same as its parts) is a reinterpretation of two prints on conjoined paper towels that were shown in the original presentation of this exhibition five years ago. Following a corporal urge to deconstruct and perhaps satirize previous work, as well as musings on change versus growth, shedding ouroboros was made by using analog methods to physically “glitch” those earlier prints, digitally translating the distortions into GIFs, and then projection mapping them onto blank paper towels.
Like the ouroboros, the projected images are both visibly and procedurally cyclical: infinitely limited. Their movements are the product of collapse and expanse, flatness and fullness, moments of paper, serpent, pixel, and the inarticulate in between.
Grace Marie DeWitt (in 2020)
Deb Ehrens
About: Deb Ehrens
Deb Ehrens embraces age-old artisan techniques and modern digital tools in her image-making. Although largely self-taught, an ongoing mentorship with painter Deborah Quinn-Munson has been instrumental in helping Ehrens develop her artistic eye.
She has also taken classes at RISD and Maine Media College and studied with Harold Ross, Dan Burkholder, and Wendi Schneider. Deb is an Elected Artist of the Art League of RI, a Juried Artist Member of the Cape Cod Art Center, an Exhibiting Member of the RI Center for Photographic Arts, and a member of re/Vision. A resident of Dartmouth, MA, Deb has been a solo and featured artist at galleries throughout the region and participated in numerous national juried exhibits. Her award-winning images are held in private, corporate and museum collections.
Artist Statement: Golden Girls: A Meditation on Transience, Memory, Storytelling and Legacy
The Golden Girls: A Meditation on Transience, Memory, Storytelling and Legacy
The Golden Girls began while a family patriarch was in his last days. Far away, in my darkened studio, I sculpted light over bits of garden ephemera laid atop handmade papers. My process requires prolonged periods of studying the most minor details of form and shadow. And while I found imagined stories of grace and loss in my fading and frail botanical structures, the very real process of the long goodbye happening two thousand miles away weighed heavy on my mind. As I painted light into my “digital canvas,” the aesthetic process of deciding what to reveal and what to mute reverberated deep in my heart. How will our stories and memories become part of the future’s fabric? Who will hold our stories in their hearts?
Part of the story was missing when I printed the Golden Girls on fine art paper. The liminal quality of transience, of something here and not here, was lost in a flat presentation. So, I embarked on a quest to create prints on glass that invite the viewer to take a deeper look, literally and figuratively. I used an emulsion-based photo transfer technique to place the image on the back of acrylic or glass to create more depth. Every print comes out differently. Just like our memories, small bits are left behind. I lay the print over gilded handmade kinwashi or unryu papers that mutes the play of reflected golden light while giving it an ethereal quality. The paper fibers complement the sense of transformation, of one thing becoming another, of memories embedding in a new tapestry.
Creating these images is full of frustrations and failures, but at the same time, it is meditative and profoundly satisfying.
Deb Ehrens in Behind the Lens: 2020
Molly Lamb
About: Molly Lamb
My photographs are a contemplation of my family history and how it permeates my being, my experiences, and my perspectives. This work has evolved into four series of photographs, each coupled with poems: Ghost Stepping, Let it Go, Take Care of Your Sister, and Before the Trees. Each series is a separate chapter in this ongoing narrative about the geography of loss, family history, and family future.
Molly Lamb holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at Rick Wester Fine Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Danforth Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Georgia Museum of Art. Recent awards include being named a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Photography, a finalist for the New Orleans Photo Alliance’s Clarence John Laughlin Award, a Critical Mass Top 50 recipient, one of Photo District News’ 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch, and one of LensCulture’s 50 Emerging Talents. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Magazine, Oxford American, Musée Magazine, Photograph, Lenscratch, and Fraction, among others. Molly is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, New York.
Artist Statement: Solace in the Stardust
The series Solace in the Stardust is a meditation on the belief that we are all made of stardust and we are all inherently interconnected. In the way that we have looked to the stars for guidance throughout history, I began doing the same, but looking for the stars everywhere in the world around me, not just above me. Stars map physical geography, but they also hold the mysteries of spirituality, awe, and wonder. Looking outward to constellations in the night sky overlaps with looking inward to the constellations of our lives and our histories. Light becomes a portal between the cosmic and the earthly, resonating with the stardust that infuses everything in the Universe and glows with our interconnectedness. In this space where they meet, we mend and heal. I find solace in the tender bursts of stardust that dapple our lives, even in the darkest times.
Molly Lamb: in Behind the Lens: 2020
Zéna Tadmoury
Zéna Tadmoury, in 2025
Chronologically, Zéna was the youngest photographer featured, having just graduated high school less than a year before. By the time the exhibition opened* in March 2020, she was already in Paris, attending Parsons where she was pursuing a major in art and business. At that time her interest was leaning towards fashion and fashion design. As is typical at this stage of life, we were not able to connect with Zéna to include an update on where she is today. It is probable we will connect with her in time to include an update on her work in the next update in 2030.
About: Zéna Tadmoury (from 2020)
Zéna Tadmoury graduated Moses Brown high school in 2019 and is currently attending Parsons in Paris. She is pursuing a major in art and business. Zéna’s body of work is eclectic varying from self portraits to her travels abroad. Her portraits centralize on female identity and feminist ideals.
Artist Statement: Self Discovery
The central idea of my project is women emerging from the mold created by society and the patriarchy, in which all the boundaries have been drawn by men. My concentration is on a series of self portraits intended to track the timeline of a woman who is weak in the shadow cast by men but develops independence by finding strength through self discovery.
Mickey Voas
Mickey Voas in 2025
Voas has remained active, but also typical for her age, personal photographic practice has taken a back seat to career and other priorities. This exhibition opportunity arrived in the middle of the process of setting up a graphic design business, and proved to be the wrong time to take on a personal project. We hope to have new work to present for our next exhibition in 2030…
“A lot can happen in five years. Since the last show I have gone through a career change, many losses, and even a name change. It is an honor to have another moment for the photographs with my grandmother shine since her passing in September 2023.
My Grandmother, Frances Dupont, was my biggest support in my artistic ambitions. She purchased every pen, paintbrush, book, class, and camera that I ever needed to begin my artistic practice at an early age. Her reactions to the work I made were always with awe, full of curiosity on how I even came up with my ideas. She was a very logical woman, but full of interest and support. She could never understand why she was my subject, and with her macular degeneration and lack of eyesight, she never saw actually saw any of these photographs herself. However, she was full of joy when she heard other people respond to my work.
When Covid made my aspirations of getting my master’s in photography unobtainable, she stood by my side as I navigated my next career path. After a very non-linear trajectory in my career, I acquired a certificate in Graphic Design through UCLA.
I just wanted to call and say I love you was the last project that I created with a camera. In some ways it feels right for now to leave it this way, and while I do aspire to create in her honor, I am in no rush for my next photographic work. I feel for my photographic practice how I do for my grandmother, that it is always with me and there will be a great moment of reuniting, in time.
For the time being, I am focusing my energy on creating branding and websites for small businesses. My life’s goal was always to help people, and I have found myself in a unique space where I am able to do so. I know that my grandmother would be proud of all that I have accomplished, and I can even hear her now saying “But don’t you miss taking pictures?”
And I would respond, “Yes, Nana, I miss taking pictures with you.”
– Mickey Voas
(previously known as Jess)
About: Jess Voas (from 2020)
Jess was raised in Auburn, Massachusetts where she first experimented with art and expression, utilizing all mediums at her disposal. She graduated in 2014 from Fitchburg State University with a dual-bachelors degree in photography and literature. Studying photography under Peter Laytin, she acquired significant darkroom and analogue experience that holds a primitive influence in her work.
Following graduation, she completed an internship at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village CO, where she assisted workshops for a number of contemporary photographers in digital mediums, bookmaking, WordPress, as well as wet plate collodion printing.
From 2014-2019, she worked as an Imaging Specialist at a nationally renowned publication.
Jess is a current graduate student at Lesley University, obtaining her Masters degree in Photography and Integrated Media. Her personal work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions, and can be found in a number of private collections throughout the U.S. She is the proud founder of the Boston based photography group Photo Lounge (https://photoloungeofboston.wordpress.com), creating space and community for local photographers of all backgrounds.
Artist Statement: I just wanted to call and say I love you
My photographs explore the physical and emotional space I find myself in while living with my 91 year old sightless grandmother. Sixty years apart, we are paralleled by the residue of our experiences, mine emotional, hers physical. We act as a refuge for one another, a temporary sanctuary in the world that lies beyond our home. While living with her, I received a letter in the mail indicative of the life I’ve left behind, a letter that challenges and disrupts this sanctuary. I am caught between the past and the future: as I rebuild my life, my grandmother is a glimpse into my own future, which is genetically inevitable. These photographs represent the acceptance of these challenges, the beauty of our relationship, while always keeping in mind the temporal nature in which we exist.
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.
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