William Mortensen at Buckland Museum

William Mortensen’s manipulated photographs are on exhibit at the Buckland Museum in Cleveland. The exhibition, titled “Witches” is just in time for Halloween. Mortensen began his career as a glamor and film still photographer in the 1920s. He soon turned to darker themes influenced by horror films. But it was his pictorialist compositing techniques that caused the photography-purist Ansel Adams to call him the Anti-christ.

The exhibition and venue are featured on WCPN Ideastream. The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick was founded in New York in 1966 and relocated to Cleveland in 2015. More about William Mortensen here. More details about the exhibition here.

Edward Burtynsky: Water at CMA

On view through September 22, 2019
Cleveland Museum of Art
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery

As part of Cuyahoga50, a citywide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the last Cuyahoga River fire and celebration of the progress made since toward clean water for all, the Cleveland Museum of Art will present two exhibitions that highlight the impact of human behavior on the environment. Featuring the work of renowned contemporary artist Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955), Water: Edward Burtynsky draws attention to current threats to clean, sustainable water and encourages visitors to reflect on individual actions that can impact the future of our planet.

Burtynsky’s global portrait explores humanity’s increasingly stressed relationship with water, the world’s most vital natural resource. Thirteen monumental color photographs survey locales from the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of the Ganges. Offering both aesthetic abstraction and concrete data, these hauntingly beautiful images encourage us to ponder whether current water-management strategies are among humankind’s great achievements or its most dangerous failures.

Learn more at clevelandart.org

Rania Matar’s “In Her Image” at Transformer Station

Rania Matar
In Her Image

Transformer Station
October 27, 2018 – January 13, 2019

Panel with Artist: November 16, 2018, 7-9pm (free)

 

Spitball @ Cleveland Print Room features CSU photo Alumni

Photo by Aja Grant

Spitball 
Cleveland Print Room
Opening reception Friday, March 2 @ 5pm

Spitball was Co-curated by the Loop’s Kory Gasser and CPR’s Shari Wilkins, Spitball features photographers age 30 and under.

The exhibition features CSU photo alumni, including Aja Grant, Alena Rosa Reyes and Anna Tararova. Other artists include Matt Beckwith, Kat Cade, Melissa Sue Jeffrey, Herald Martin, Jesse Mervis,  Jamie Richey, Alison Scarpulla, Melissa Schwachenwald Raymond Scott, Manda Specht, Kate Sweeney, Chad Tindel, and Jessica Will.

Come out an support young photographic artists like yourselves. Say you’re going on the Facebook event page.

Cleveland Print Room Exhibition

Cleveland Print Room
Laura Ruth Bidwell and Lissa Rivera Joint Exhibition
Opening: Friday, Sep 8, 5-9pm
Gallery Talk: Saturday, Sep 9, 4-5:30pm

Cleveland Print Room is excited to host a joint exhibition featuring the Cleveland debut of internationally-shown, NYC-based artist Lissa Rivera, and new work by Cleveland artist Laura Ruth Bidwell.

“Beautiful Boy,” the ongoing project of Lissa Rivera, focuses, as she writes, “on my domestic partner as muse, documenting our exploration of femininity and the nuances of photography as a transformative medium. I am using photography as a testing ground for my partner, who is genderqueer, to visualize multiple feminine identities. The photographs provide a canvas to investigate the visual language of womanhood that I was raised with, and that my partner is only beginning to explore. Through watching movies, listening to music and viewing countless photographs, I‘ve absorbed an archive of techniques to share. The photographs recall childhood fantasies of dressing up, tapping into deep-seated narratives about desire, beauty, freedom and cultural taboo. Although our emotional relationship is private and real, we perform a romanticism that is obsessive and decadent. The fantasy of dressing up transforms the experience of being photographed into one that fuses identity-creation with image-creation.” Rivera is represented by ClampArt. For further information on Lissa Rivera, see http://www.lissarivera.com/

About her new work for this exhibition, from her Gratiot series, Laura Ruth Bidwell states, “GRATIOT is a name. A place. A state of mind. Gratiot is a photographic project based on the fictional lives of Charles and Victoire Chouteau Gratiot, immortals who have navigated and thrived by night, across three centuries.” For further information on Laura Ruth Bidwell, see  http://www.laurabidwell.com/

Please join us for the opening this September. The exhibition runs from September 8 to November 4.

 

 

Jonny Lyons at Cleveland Print Room

Jonny Lyons: (Here Come) The Goloshans
Opening Reception: Friday, May 19, 5-8pm
Cleveland Print Room
2550 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114

Visit the Facebook event page.

Come meet AIRconnect, international artist-in-residence, Jonny Lyons from Glasgow, Scotland and see what he has created during his stay in Cleveland. His work is a direct response from Lyons time in Cleveland, people he has met through street photography, walking the streets and the stories they have shared together. From this sculptural work, he has created and staged short performances within the Cleveland landscape documented with analogue photography.

He has worked at Cleveland Print Room, Zygote Press and Praxis.

Jonny’s practice explores the fragility of friendship and adventure through performances documented by photography and film. He often creates ingenious devices, or functioning sculptures, to execute his ‘hand-crafted mischief’ which are presented – having fulfilled their one purpose – as relics of the event, together with the photographic evidence. But the photographs are not simply documentation of a sequence of anarchic events. They fix the moment between ’cause’ and ‘effect’ and are imbued with wit, melancholy and the physical humour of early silent cinema. In carrying out these processes, collaborations and journeys Lyons attempts to reconcile reckless youth with the pressures of adulthood; these are snap-shots of ‘Lost Boys’ putting their most dangerous, outlandish ideas into practice and – one feels, with some luck – getting away with it.

Special thanks to the Ohio Arts Council for funding this pilot program that not only brings an artist from Scotland to Cleveland but also sends an Ohio artist to Dundee, Scotland for 6-weeks to work at Dundee Contemporary Arts in their amazing print shop. This May, artist Anna Tararova will head to Scotland. This program was also funded through our CPR FOTO BRUNCH fundraiser in Fall 2016. Thanks to all who attended.

Black in America at Cleveland Museum of Art

February 26 – July 30, 2017
Cleveland Museum of Art
Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery | Gallery 230

Louis Draper and Leonard Freed: Two photographers – one black, one white – look at life during the civil rights era. Both artists were incredibly talented formalists who put that skill at the service of expression. They also shared a goal: to create dignified depictions of African Americans that portrayed them not as victims or heroes but as individuals.

 

 

 

Cleveland Print Room Photography Exhibition

Cleveland Print Room (map)
Perpetual Ephemera: The Works of Preston Buchtel, Ryn Clarke, Hadley K Conner, and Raheleh Mohammad
Friday, Sept. 30, from 5 to 9 p.m

The Fall gallery schedule begins with Perpetual Ephemera, a group show featuring the work of four area artists — Preston Buchtel, Ryn Clarke, Hadley K Conner, and Raheleh Mohammad – creating mixed media pieces and assemblages incorporating a variety of photographic processes. It opens with a reception Friday, Sept. 30 from 5 to 9 p.m., with a gallery talk Saturday, Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. It runs through Saturday, Nov. 5.

Raheleh Mohammad is an Iranian born who currently lives and works in Ohio. Photography for her is a visual experience, which allows her to capture the moments that could either convey a narrative or a fading reality in a poetic interpretation. Her focus in this exhibition is ‘distance’ and its perception in the broadest sense.

Ryn Clarke is a visual artist and photographer exploring the image-making process using a variety of photographic processes, including hand-coloring, photopolymer gravure, hand made papers, print making and encaustics.  This new work focuses on an ever-changing natural world – beautiful, even in its decay.

Preston Buchtel primarily works in the mediums of painting, collage, and photography, he often combines them, creating mixed media works.  In this exhibition, he is showing small collage/mixed media pieces drawn from work made over the past twenty years.

Hadley K Conner works exclusively with film, generating images in the darkroom using traditional and alternative photographic processes. The subject matter in this show stems from an ongoing investigation of those who embrace both the past and a sense of theatricality within designated spaces, specific events and their daily lives.

Unfixed at Transformer Station

Paul Shambroom, Poppy, 2014 Pigmented Inkject Print

UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image
Transformer Station
Opening Reception: Friday, Jan 15, 6pm
Additional events below

This winter Transformer Station presents UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image, an exhibition featuring 11 national and international artists who are exploring the ephemeral image in a wide variety of ways with and without cameras, in still images as well as video. Although photographic images existed long before, the birth of photography is marked by the date when we learned to “fix” a representative image on a light sensitive surface permanently. Since then, the truth of photographic representation has been often questioned and much discussed. Less debated, but just as questionable is the permanence of the photographic image. Of course, eventually, all surfaces decay and images fade, but the artists in this exhibition embrace the fleeting nature of the image that is created by light and is eventually destroyed by it.

Many of the works in UNFIXED have been created for the exhibition, including a site-specific installation of Wait and See by Swiss artists

F + D Cartier and a project by Matthew Gamber that deconstructs the illusion of color photography through the lyrical use of obsolete slide projectors. John Opera’s application of natural, light-sensitive dyes mean that his photographs will fade gradually, while Phil Chang’s unfixed photographs will disappear within hours of the opening party. A group of vernacular photographs from the collection of Peter Cohen reveal the surprising beauty of Kodacolor snapshots from the 1950’s that, owing to a faulty dye couplers, have all turned pink. Other works in the show are elegiac—Brian Ganter’s heat sensitive tintypes reveal haunting portraits of queer porn stars, all of whom died of AIDS, when held in the viewer’s hands. Meanwhile Paul Shambroom’s photographs of lost pet flyers, washed out by sun and rain, quietly mourn what can never be recaptured. Also featuring work by Eric William Carroll, Dustin Grella, Luke Stettner, and Tom Persinger, UNFIXED brings together objects and images that cause us to consider mortality and entropy, time and memory and the beauty of moments that can never last.

UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image will open on Friday, January 15^th. Transformer Station members are invited to preview the exhibition from 5 – 6 p.m. Artists Françoise and Daniel Cartier will deliver a free public lecture at 6:30 p.m., followed by a reception.

Additional Programs

Matthew Gamber Gallery Talk, Saturday, January 16^th, 2 p.m.

Dr. Kate Albers Lecture, “The Ephemeral Photograph: From Salt Prints to Snapchat,” Saturday, March 12^th, 2 p.m.

Tom Persinger Gallery Talk and Performance, Sunday, April 3^rd, 3 p.m.

Prof Eric Vaughn’s Photography at Beck Center

Eric Vaughn: Cross Section
Beck Center for the Arts
Opening reception: Sat, Jan 9, 6-7:30pm

The Beck Center main gallery is proud to host the opening reception for Eric Vaughn’s one person photography show, Cross Section. Eric’s images demonstrate his techinical skills as well as his unique artistic vision and a contemporary art approach to his medium. “Retaining the photographic trace of observable phenomena operates as a guiding principle in my art practice..” – E. Vaughn

The public is welcome to attend the artist’s reception free of charge. The show will be on view from 1/8/16 – 1/31/16. Please visit www.beckcenter.orgfor more information on open hours.

Eric teaches photography at CSU. His exhibition features an 18-piece display of 40″ prints from his Distant, Disrupted Visions series. Click here to visit the Facebook Event page.