Experimental Approaches: Part II
March 16th – April 28th, 2018
Reception: Friday, March 16th 5:00pm – 7:30pm
Schneider Gallery is pleased to showcase the second part to our two-part group exhibition of experimental photography. Part II features work by Alison Carey, Doug Fogelson, Bryan Hiott and Accra Shepp. The artists in this exhibition explore a diverse scope of approaches to photography, employing non-traditional materials and historical processes.
Alison Carey’s photographic constructs are influenced by biology and paleontology, natural history, and the geology of our earth and moon. Her series, In Memoriam, recontextualizes taxidermied creatures from the Field Museum of Natural History by placing them into newly constructed dioramas. The photographs are a homage to these animals for their contribution to scientific study and for serving their afterlives as specimens on public display.
The photographs in Doug Fogelson’s series Chemical Alterations explore the natural world and the impact of climate change, ecocide and extinction by directly altering the film’s surface with industrial chemicals. The destruction of the image symbolically points to humankind’s relationship to the environment while also referencing the photographic medium itself.
Bryan Hiott’s wet plate collodion portraits create moments of stillness in which the subject reveals something beyond surface appearance. To sit for a portrait in this process is to engage in a dialogue between the present and the past, between what is hidden and what is revealed.
In his new body of work inspired by a residency in Italy, Accra Shepp explores the relationship between the past and present through two and three panel contact prints using the cyanotype process. Dating back to the 1840’s, the cyanotype’s signature intense blue forces a shift in how we understand the images while simultaneously linking us to our past.