GREENSBORO, NC.- GreenHill presents photography by eight North Carolina artists in an exhibition entitled Analog. The work is on view at GreenHill from August 3 November 4, 2018. Admission is free to view and open to the public. All artworks are available for purchase.
Artists on view are Signe Ballew, Diana H. Bloomfield, Courtney Johnson, Michael Keaveney, Holden Richards, Dale Rio, elin oHara slavick, and Joshua White. Using traditional, analog, and alternative process photography, the artworks in this exhibition capture fleeting moments out of time and space. Kallitypes, cyanotypes, Polaroids, and lumen prints are some of the mediums used by these North Carolina photographers exploring the field of photography, both in subject matter and process.
The ghostly scenes of abandoned Americana captured on film in Dale Rios series Forgotten 66 seem to melt into the landscape as they are overtaken by creeping vines and obscured by decades of dust. I want to make the invisible visible, explains elin oHara slavick of her series After Hiroshima, also on view in Analog. This series of photographs document artifacts of the A-bomb with cyanotypes, rubbings, and silver gelatin prints.
Diana H. Bloomfield and Holden Richards reflect the history of photographic processes in their work. Bloomfields photos of irises are each a tri-color gum dichromate over cyanotype, processes which both originate from the mid-1800s. The repeated layering and
mis-registration of the gum dichromate process, in particular, remove all the hard and clearly defined edges, resulting in softness and ambiguitymuch the way we see and remember, she says. Richards kallitypes of the wilderness near his home in Hillsborough are created using vintage large and medium format film cameras. He says, using large 19th century plate film camera creates a need for going slow for being intentional.
Michael Keaveneys experimental photo-collages question the very nature and purpose of photography itself. [Photographs] assume the role of truth teller
representing events and replacing memory, explains Keaveney. He sands away the surface of his assemblages of found c-print photographs, which abstracts the pre-existing image while pulling out the embedded colors and paper that are hidden underneath the surface. Likewise, Signe Ballew turns photographs into objects by layering a wispy Polaroid transfer onto hand-blown glass discs.
Courtney Johnsons series, Salt, uses salt water from the bodies of water she photographs to produce dreamy, pink and brown hued, salted paper prints. She says, one particularly beautiful effect of the unusual hyper salinity in this process is the accumulation of salt on the finished images, which sparkles in the light. Joshua White speaks about the magic of lumen prints: I often print in the same sunlight that shines on my subjects, allowing me to observe the quiet processes that surround us every day, deepening my understanding of our communion with nature.