Antiquarian Avant-Garde Photography
Works by the North Texas Alternative Process Group
Sun to Moon Gallery, Dallas, Texas
July 19 – August 18, 2012
PHOTOGRAPHER BIOS/ARTIST STATEMENTS
In alphabetical order – scroll down for other artists
Peter J. Blackburn has been working in alternative photographic processes for almost twenty-five years, concentrating principally in tricolor gum and casein bichromate printing. Holding an M.A. from Dallas Theological Seminary, it was through the media and communication emphasis in his graduate studies which initially drew Peter to the visual possibilities of photography. Although essentially self-taught in the alternative genre, he did receive formal photographic training from Richland College, Dallas, Texas. He credits the work and occasional interaction with the highly respected Canadian gum printer, Stephen Livick, as a significant technical influence in his own pursuit of artistic expression. Since 2004, Peter has enjoyed representation by Afterimage Gallery, Dallas, Texas, one of the oldest art galleries in the world devoted exclusively to photography. Samples of his work can be seen on the web at Afterimage.com and at AlternativePhotography.com, an important repository of current alternative photographic imagery and instruction. Peter is an active blogger, researcher, and consultant for the site. Most recently, Peter helped edit for publication the new book by Malin Fabbri, Anthotypes (CreateSpace 2011), producing photographs using organic material from your garden!
While Peter has broad experience in conventional commercial work, it is the handmade photograph rendered in rich, saturated color which particularly fuels his creative engine. He travels along two interconnected thoroughfares. One is to produce prints of the highest quality possible using means of the lowest technology permissible. The other endeavors to follow a route which embraces the unencumbered, the straightforward, and the least hazardous. Battery-less, whistle-free cameras, the UV from sunlight, and the most marginal use of dichromate each contribute their own measure of simplicity and frugality. In the end, all roads lead toward the bold, bright, vivid, graphic, and dynamic. The play of color and light intertwined with paper and pigment offer endless opportunities to capture those traits so aptly appropriate for dichromate work. Within a world of multilevel complexity, Peter seeks to capture and interpret, to render and understand, to recreate each of those qualities and more in a humble, life-long response to a personal, awe-inspiring Creator.
Peter currently resides with his teenage daughter, Ashlen, and a rollicking French bulldog, Poppies, near the Firewheel section of Garland, Texas.
Amy Holmes George is a fine art photographer whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. as well as Italy, England and China. Amy's work has been featured in over ninety exhibitions and is housed in numerous collections such as The Getty, The Kinsey Institute and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2008, Amy was awarded a Fulbright grant to fund a rephotographic project based on the Fratelli Alinari photo archive in Florence, Italy. This project has traveled to ten venues internationally and has been the subject of various artist lectures and workshops across the country. Amy’s work has been published in a variety of magazines including Diffusion (Volume II) and SHOTS (No. 106) as well as The Elements of Photography book by Angela Faris Belt (2008) and Robert Hirsch’s 5th edition of Exploring Color Photography: From Film to Pixels (2011). Her photographic images, while surveying seemingly disparate subject matter, are always united by an investigation of process and personal history.
Photography has been at the center of Amy’s creative endeavors for nearly twenty years, bridging traditional darkroom silver printing to digital imaging and montage, with a special passion for historical photographic processes (especially Palladium and Ziatype). During 2010, Amy and Frank Lopez co-founded the North Texas Alternative Process Group, which meets monthly in the DFW area—the catalyst for this group exhibition at Sun to Moon Gallery. Most recently, Amy taught alternative processes as adjunct photography faculty at Baylor University and the University of North Texas. As a former tenured professor of photography and digital media from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, Amy founded the School’s first study abroad program (based in Italy) and was nominated for the University Faculty Achievement Award in Teaching. She is also the Vice President of the Texas Photographic Society and Vendor Liaison for the South Central Regional Board of the Society for Photographic Education, serving formerly as Chair and Treasurer. Amy holds an MFA in photography from Clemson University and a BFA cum laude in photography and graphic design from Miami University.
While born and raised in the Midwest, Amy currently resides in McKinney, Texas, with her husband and two children. You may read more about her work at www.amyholmesgeorge.com.
Loli Kantor is a fine art and documentary photographer based in Fort Worth, Texas. Born in Paris, France, and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel and in Buffalo, NY.
Kantor’s long term project (2004-2011) focuses on the reemergence of Jewish life and culture in Central and Eastern Europe. As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, she brings a deeply personal interest, as well as unique sensibility to this body of work.
Part of the project is printed using the palladium process, creating un-enlarged contact prints some as single images and some as diptychs and triptychs. The subtlety and elegance, of the palladium prints allow the viewer to look closely at the wide range of detail in the image. The palladium look points to the historical layers of content, reminiscent of snapshots taken in the 1940s. The slow and painstaking work of the palladium process creates a space for her process of dealing with the emotional impact of this work.
The companion portion of the project was printed as vivid, highly saturated color pigment prints, conveying the tangible reality of these places, including the full palette of the region’s hues, offering the viewer a glimpse into current time. Juxtaposed with the palladium prints, the images create a dialogue between past and present and a wider look at people and culture.
Kantor’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally in China, Poland, Ukraine, Spain and the Czech Republic. In 2010 she was named one of the top 50 photographers in PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass competition and won third place in the Reviewers’ Choice Award at PhotoNOLA. Her work was honored with an award of excellence for her solo exhibition in the 2009 Lishui International Photography Festival in Lishui, China. Her work has been featured in publications such as LensWork (issue no. 87) with an exclusive interview. An artist book for ‘ there was a forest ‘ was published in January 2009. A forthcoming publication by the University of Texas Press is due for release in fall 2013. Kantor’s photography is included in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Lishui Photography Museum, China, Lviv National Museum, Ukraine, Drohobych museum Drohobych Ukraine, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Colorado, Temple Emanuel in Houston and private collections in the US and abroad.
Frank Lopez (b. 1967) is an antiquarian avant-garde photographer, specializing in the Wetplate Collodion process along with cultural studies utilizing Pinhole photography. Frank received his Bachelors in Photography from East Texas State University in 1990 and has been teaching and working with non-silver techniques ever since. An award winning instructor, Frank is director of the photographic program at Greenhill School in Addison where he teaches 19th – 21st Century technology to his students.
The main focus of Frank’s work is culture, both local and international. During most summers, Frank helps to lead a cultural immersion class in China and Korea, utilizing the camera as a vehicle for self-expression. It is here where he delves deeply into the local culture with the pinhole camera, creating significant imagery of the cultural landscape.
Frank is a recipient of the Dallas Observer MasterMind Award for 2011, recognizing significant cultural contributors to the city of Dallas along with being named Faculty Leader at Greenhill School, the highest award given to a faculty member. To go along with this, Frank is a frequent lecturer at workshops and schools, having demonstrated the Tintype/Ambrotype techniques at numerous public functions.
Frank lives and works out of his Fair Park studio where he teaches Wetplate Collodion workshops and his work is held in numerous private collections. Private sittings and workshops are always available, please inquire at www.franklopez.com.
Kathy Lovas was born in Duluth, Minnesota. She holds a B.S. degree in biology from St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana and an MFA in photography from Texas Woman's University in Denton. She is a 1995 recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography, and was a 1991 fellow of the American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar at New York University. Selected solo exhibitions of her work include Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Galveston Art Center, Women and Their Work, Austin, and Handley-Hicks Gallery, Fort Worth. She has been a resident artist at Project Row Houses in Houston, Connemara Conservancy in Allen, TX and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the region, and she recently created site specific installations at DiverseWorks, Houston, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas at Beaumont, the Arlington Museum of Art, UT San Antonio Satellite
Space at Blue Star, and Warehouse Theater in Greenville, SC.
Kathy lives in Dallas, Texas and has been on the photography faculty in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas in Denton since 1992. In addition she has held teaching appointments at Southern
Methodist University, UT Arlington, UT Dallas, and Texas Woman’s University.
Kathy’s art is research-based and results in room-sized installations as well as smaller bodies of work and sculptural pieces incorporating photography. She thinks of her projects as works of “visual historical fiction” through which she explores how photographs function in society and how they move us.
Like all Kathy’s work, the four-piece Step Children series is multi-layered conceptually; it references a personal narrative as well as the ontology of photography. The photographs depict Kathy’s mother and her mother’s brothers on the steps of their home in Brainerd, MN. The year was c. 1915 and their mother had just died. Time stopped for the family and time stopped in the photographs. In a short time their father would remarry and they would become stepchildren. This series addresses history, place, gesture, memory, and the nature of photography.
Brian J. Magnuson is a fine art photographer who primarily works in the traditional medium of silver gelatin, but enjoys the many different ways of working with the photographic medium as well as many of forms of art. Brian was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and returned after a growing up in Golden Valley, Minnesota to attend the University of Tulsa where he received his degree in Photography and Art Education.
Brian’s photographic life did not start until late in his college experience. He was an Army reservist and an athlete in college when an injury forced him out of both. He changed his major from Psychology his senior year to Art. After graduating he set out to make photographs while educating others. Brian has exhibited his photography in solo and group shows as well as artist lectures. He taught at the senior high level for six years before moving to Texas.
Brian lives in McKinney, Texas with his delightful wife Mary Magnuson and two wonderful children John and Anna.
Rachel Rushing was born in Natchitoches, Louisiana and attended Louisiana Tech University where she received a BFA in Photography, before moving to Dallas, TX. Rushing has worked as a bookbinder in a book repair and restoration studio, an art teacher and Program Coordinator for the Grace Project (a volunteer art program for an under-resourced elementary school), and at Oil and Cotton: Creative Exchange, a Dallas community gallery and art school.
Rushing's work centers on ideas of human interconnectivity, personal identity, materiality and craft, and interaction between the artist, the work, and the viewer. She is currently working in historical photographic printing processes, methods of bookmaking, and non-traditional photographic presentations. Most recently, her work has been exhibited in group shows; Both Sides of the Lens: Self Portraiture and Photo Alchemy: Alternative Processes in Photographic Media. In 2011 she began seeking her MFA in Photography at the University of North Texas where she has been awarded Teaching Assistantships in Basic Design and in Introduction to Photography.
Judy Sherrod -- The Nocturne Series
I am a camera maker. Box cameras. Pine boxes.
This surprising avocation chose me. I owned nothing more than a drill and an electric sander at the time. But my path away from a former love, digital imagery, led me straight into the puzzlement of pinhole photography and camera making.
I had become disillusioned by digital photography. There was no “me” in the beautiful images I was making. The process was mechanical, robotic. I needed something at the other end of the photographic spectrum.
Soooo, I bought wood on August 11, 2009 and have been making pinhole cameras ever since. Some are small, 120-film cameras, some large – 40 x 40 inches. They have fallen apart, fallen over, come unglued, leaked light, leaked water, over-exposed, under-exposed, and they occasionally produce a nice photograph.
It was my good fortune to meet up with wet-plate collodion artist, S. Gayle Stevens from Chicago, at portfolio reviews in New Orleans in December 2010. We began plotting the following summer to try to join the two processes – wet-plate collodion and pinhole photography.
You see fruits of our labor here at the Sun to Moon Gallery. We are making these 20 by 20 inch tintypes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It takes two people working together to produce each plate, another to manage the inventory of prosecco, and a brown-nose dog to keep us laughing when we need it.
Because our ages, when added together, total one-hundred eleven, we enjoy referring to ourselves as “Two Old Women.” That is also the title of our blog, twooldwomen.wordpress.com. You are invited to take a look and see how this whole thing took off and unfolded itself.
Judy Sherrod, Wichita Falls, Texas
TwoOldWomen.wordpress.com
Susan Sponsler was born in Seoul, Korea. She was adopted by American parents and was raised on a farm in Iowa. Sponsler’s father, a Korean War veteran, and her mother went through the Holt agency to adopt two babies – Susan and a younger brother. Later her adoptive mother also gave birth to two boys.
Susan earned her bachelor's degree in graphic design at Iowa State University. Shortly after, she joined the staff of the office of marketing and communication at Texas Woman’s University. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from TWU. She was a fellow at the American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar at New York University.
Susan is Creative Director in the Office of Marketing and Communication at Texas Woman’s University and lives in Richardson, Texas with her husband, John Carstarphen, an independent filmmaker.
Sponsler’s works have been shown in Seoul, South Korea; Panama City, Panama; and in many US cities including Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Fort Worth, Denton and Dallas. Her work is held in several private collections and in the permanent collections of the Korean American Museum in Los Angeles and Texas Instruments in Dallas. Her work is also included in numerous publications, most notably the book Our Grandmothers: Loving Portraits by 74 Women Photographers and “Convergent Conversations” by Margo Machida in Blackwell’s Journal: A companion to Asian art and architecture.
“Yellow Work” is about stereotypes and the history of identifying Asians as 'yellow'. Nobody wants to be "yellow" – to be yellow is to be a coward, lemons are products that fail; yellow peril names the fear of America being overrun with Asian people. Sponsler says her early dislike of the color was closely entwined with her low self esteem as an Asian American. Today she embraces being 'yellow'. Naming herself yellow now comes from a position of strength like black Americans turned 'black' from derogatory to powerful in the 1960s. Some works use Korean hangul text as meaningless graphics, and at other times hangul can be translated into real words. This random use of text in a different language relates to her experiences with people who assume she can speak Korean.
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Sun to Moon Gallery
1515 Levee Street
Dallas, TX 75207
Phone 214.745.1199