“As a weaver using digital technologies to create my designs and compositions, I rely heavily on careful planning and calculation. This is an inherent way that many weavers, whether they use digital looms or ancient looms, tend to work: the loom being a machine that requires careful planning, measurement, calculation, and the strict parameters of the grid. My large-scale works, however, often begin as small paintings and fabric collages, through which I identify compositional ideas, color schemes, and other formal decisions. These small-scale works often involve a different approach than the very strict and calculated process of weaving: one of intuition, experimentation, and play. In this way I am able to satisfy sometimes seemingly oppositional attitudes in the studio: the planned and the unplanned, the organized and the chaotic, the intuitive and the calculated.
For the Halsey Institute’s Patron Print Program, I am presenting 25 small fabric collages, each an iteration or preparatory meditation created during the planning of the larger works in my exhibition, The Ends of Rainbows. These small works, minimal in nature, focus on color, density, and relationships between geometry and light. While not all these iterations end in the production of large-scale works, I see them as an archive or an account of the creative process, in which dead ends are as important as clear ways forward.” – Jovencio de la Paz
Jovencio de la Paz is an artist and weaver based out of Eugene, OR. Their work explores the intersecting histories of weaving and modern computers, balancing the traditional processes of weaving, dye, and stitch-work with the complexities and contradictions of our present-day digital culture. At the Halsey Institute, de la Paz will presented three new bodies of woven and stitched works. de la Paz’s work ranges from textiles designed using an algorithmic software based on a 1950s code that visualized Darwin’s theory of evolution to weavings made together with their mother and grandmother in a reversal of generations in the exchange of traditional knowledge. Together, these works contemplated issues of ancestry, genealogy, mortality, and memorial through the construction of cloth.
Jovencio de la Paz: The Ends of Rainbows was on view at the Halsey Institute from January 13 – February 25, 2023.
Jovencio de la Paz
Scattered Rainbows 1, 2022
Handsewn acrylic on canvas
Edition of 25
“I became familiar with concrete and visual poetry while conducting research for my project Faith, Hope, and $5,000, a 16-piece gridded installation of cut and collaged book pages extracted from a mid-1970s corporate history of Monsanto. Faith, Hope, and $5,000 draws inspiration from mid-century poets interested in using words not solely to impose meaning, but as markers of space and visual imagery. I discovered the rich history of the Black Mountain College poets (Hilda Morley, Jonathan Williams), artists (Dorothea Rockburne) and composers (John Cage) who privileged ideas of chance and absence, often with a minimalist aesthetic, over traditional narrative readings. All were fully aware of the importance of space–negative or otherwise–to impress upon their audience an alternative, and some would say radical, way to see and hear.” – Kirsten Stolle
Stolle is a visual artist working in collage, text-based images and installation. Her work helps lay bare the propaganda-like methods of large corporations, especially those in the agricultural and biotech fields. Building upon her decade-long research into companies like Bayer/Monsanto and Dow Chemical, her work forefronts historical ties to chemical warfare and revel persistent greenwashing. Stolle’s work interrogates the effects of chemical companies on our food supply and their consistent efforts to minimize effects of their toxic products on our health and environment.
Kirsten Stolle: Only You Can Prevent a Forest will be on view August 26 – December 10, 2022.
Kirsten Stolle
Faith, Hope, and $5,000, p. 266, 2017
Archival inkjet print
10 x 13 inches
Edition of 25 with AP
This work encapsulates Dan Estabrook’s fascination with photography as an object. As a digital print of a tintype that he made, Estabrook uses modern technology to mediate an antiquated form of photography–one that only existed in the physical world, as tintypes do. Estabrook manipulates the print by cutting out a segment, revealing the photograph’s physical qualities. With this work, the artist examines the history of photography, from its nascent beginnings as light-sensitive chemicals to its now digital ubiquity.
Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston, where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk-rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980s. As an undergraduate at Harvard University he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James. In 1993, after receiving an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Campaign, Estabrook continued working and teaching in Illinois, Boston, and Florida, and eventually settled in Brooklyn, New York.
Estabrook has continued to make contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the nineteenth century, with forays into sculpture, painting, drawing, and other works on paper. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including the Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. In 2019, he was the juror for the Young Contemporaries exhibition at the Halsey Institute.
Dan Estabrook: Wunderkammer was on view in the Halsey Institute galleries in summer 2021.
Dan Estabrook
The Other Source, 2020
Archival ink-jet print with hand cut-out
10 x 8 inches
As a multi-faceted self-taught artist, Butch Anthony creates works that investigate and appropriate images from the American vernacular. His practice includes painting cartoon-like skeletons on top of antique portraits in elaborate, gilded frames. An avid collector of unique and bizarre objects, he also created the Museum of Wonder, a modern-day cabinet of curiosities filled with art, artifacts, and antiques including the world’s largest gallstone. Butch also hosts the Possum Trot Auction, a weekly junk and art auction on his 80-acre parcel of land in Seale, Alabama. He has also built the Museum of Mystery, the first drive-through art and antiques gallery. In addition to making and selling art, building bizarre roadside attractions, and collecting found objects to incorporate into his own artwork, Butch contributes to Auburn University’s Rural Studio design + build program.
Butch Anthony: Inside/Out was on view at the Halsey Institute January – February 2020.
Butch Anthony
Nature Boy, 2019
19 x 15 inches
Archival pigment print
Edition of 20
The Revenants’ Likenesses by Böhler & Orendt is a photographic edition based on their video installation The Carrion Cheer, A Faunistic Tragedy. There are nine images to choose from: Carolina Parakeet, Yangtz River Dolphin of Baiji, Great Auk, Steller’s Sea Cow, Bluebuck, Pig-footed Bandicoot, Honshu Wolk, White Crested Jumping Spider, and Pinta Island Tortoise.
In The Carrion Cheer exhibition, spirits of nine different species of extinct animals make their appearance in a “makeshift transdimensional stopover camp” of nine semi-geodesic tents. Technically evoked by nine synchronized 15-minute video loop projections onto screens of mist, the nine different subjects of the photo series are issued in nine batches of nine copies each. In the tradition of William H. Mumbler, Böhler & Orendt have produced portraits of the nine revenant light beings cast in this “faunistic tragedy”: disembodied deputies of species like the Carolina Parakeet, Steller’s Sea Cow, and the Pig-footed Bandicoot have been photographically captured while croaking, speaking or singing to their human fellow creatures.
Böhler & Orendt
The Revenants’ Liknesses, 2018
21.5 x 16.75 inches
Digital print
In late 2015, Italian artist Hitnes embarked on a twenty-city road trip throughout America with the goal of retracing the endeavors of John James Audubon in the 19th century. Audubon’s ambitious goal was to document all of the birds in the country, and these well-known drawings made up his book The Birds in America. Captivated by the enormous scope of Audubon’s goal, Hitnes traveled across the country, aiming to cover in three months what Audubon did in as many decades. Hitnes’s journey on one hand allowed him to explore the state of the birds nearly two centuries after Audubon encountered them. But it also became an all-encompassing performance project in which he gathered materials and made sketches, created public murals, and documented his interactions with a wide range of Americans in video.
Hitnes’s exhibition, The Image Hunter: On the Trail of John James Audubon, in fall of 2018 documented his journey, elaborating on what it is that drives a person to dedicate multiple decades of their life to pursuing an obsession like Audubon did. The exhibition was also accompanied by the premiere of a feature-length documentary film on Hitnes’s trip, directed by filmmaker Giacomo Agnetti. Hitnes was also an artist in residence during late summer 2017 at the Halsey Institute, where he further explored the connection between John James Audubon and Charleston.
Hitnes
Nido, 2012
13.5 x 19.5 inches
Copper etching on Graphia paper
Tom Stanley’s abstractions draw on the forms of the world around him, typically including items like boats, ladders, water towers, and houses. In his recent Vessels series, his canvases riff on the motif of a boat, often portraying one of more such vessels amidst a plane of harried lines and sgraffito. Such a series emphasize the duality contained within his paintings: expressive yet measured, formally-engaged yet conceptually-driven, abstract yet connected to reality.
Floating in Louisiana is a limited-edition print he produced for our Patron Print program. Tom Stanley was featured in a solo exhibition at the Halsey Institute entitled Scratching the Surface in summer 2017 including over 60 paintings and drawings from the last decade.
Stanley is an artist and the retired chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Winthrop. He also served as director of Winthrop University Galleries from 1990-2010. Born in Fort Hood, Texas, Stanley grew up in Concord, N.C. He received a B.A. in Art from Sacred Heart College in 1972. After serving two years alternative service in lieu of induction, he worked in Passaic, N.J., and New York City in the design and wall accessory industry. He received an M.A. in applied art history and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of South Carolina in 1980, where he also taught relief printmaking and 2D design at maximum security Central Corrections Institute. Stanley has served on the faculties of Arkansas College (now Lyon College) in Batesville, Ark.; Barry University in Miami, Fla.; and Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C. He also was director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury.
In recent years, his artwork has been exhibited at Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, Ga., the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Gallery twenty-four in Berlin. In 2005, his Floating series was exhibited at the South Carolina State Museum’s Triennial Exhibition and in 2004 at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. In 2002-03, he exhibited at La Galerie du Marché in Lausanne, Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, N.C., Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, and the Halsey Gallery in Charleston. In 2006, he had a solo exhibition in the Gallery at Carillon with his series entitled “The Neighborhood.”
Tom Stanley
Floating in Louisiana, 2017
17 x 19 inches
Silkscreen
Martha A. Strawn has spent decades documenting the threshold diagrams that have consecrated Hindu space in India for millennia. In the Hindu world-view, threshold is a profoundly important concept that represents a passage between one space and place and another, creating a visual bridge between the secular and the sacred. Accordingly, the literal threshold a person crosses when entering and exiting a home or business symbolizes the threshold one crosses between the physical and spiritual realms of existence. Hindus have long believed it is possible to affect a person’s well-being by using diagrams to sanctify the “threshold space.” The diagrams do so by “trapping” ill will, evil, bad luck, or negative energy within their colorful and elaborate configurations, thereby cleansing those who traverse the space and sending them on their way with renewed spirit, positive energy, and good luck and fortune.
Of this print, Rooster and Chicken Strut, Strawn writes, “This picture was made in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in January 1986 during the Pongal Festival, which is synonymous with the South Indian New Year. The hammer and sickle is a sign of the political climate at the time. The diagram are clearly for an auspicious occasion because they are made with white and red color. The primary method of application is by using a small cloth dipped in chalk mixed with water and dibbled off the fingers to form dots and lines. Inside the door on the floor you can see a dry application which is more delicate in appearance. That application uses dry rice flour held in the palm of the hand and pushed slowly onto the ground with the thumb and forefinger as the hand moves to create the diagram. The women who make these diagrams are very skilled in this practice.”
Artist’s website: www.marthastrawn.com
Martha Strawn
Rooster and Chicken Strut, 2016
22 x 17 inches
Archival pigment print
Chris Jordan: Midway was on view at the Halsey Institute in fall 2017 in SEA CHANGE and fall 2010 in our bluesphere project.
Jordan uses his practice to visualize humans’ relationship with the natural world. With digital photography and collage, he helps translate abstract data and problems into visual formats, allowing viewers to comprehend their own consumption habits better, for instance. His Running the Numbers series explored problems too big to conceptualize, including ocean plastics and overfishing. After a series of trips to Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, he created his feature film ALBATROSS, which examines the effect of society’s consumption and waste habits on the titular birds.
About Moon with Ice Halo over the Atacama Desert, Chile, Jordan states:
“I arrived in La Serena, Chile to attend an international congress on the oceans, having traveled something like 20 hours to get there. It was 5:00pm and I was exhausted, and was tempted to take a nap, but I knew that if I did, I would sleep until midnight and then be wide awake, and my cycle would be off for the whole week. So instead I headed out for a walk on the beach. As I walked out of the hotel door, a guy randomly asked me ‘Are you looking for the bus to the observatory?’ I thought for a second, and said ‘Yes,’ and he gestured toward a bus and said, ‘You’d better hurry, it is leaving right now!’
“Luckily I had my camera on me, and I ran for the bus. They drove us an hour inland, gaining a few thousand feet of altitude, to a dry, cold, and incredibly dark desert area where there were several observatories. Unfortunately we didn’t see many stars because it was full moon and the sky was covered by a veil of hazy ice clouds. I didn’t have a tripod, so instead I took off my jacket, put my camera on the ground facing straight up, and took that photo using the 10-second timer. It took me a few tries to get the moon right in the middle. The moon had what they call a 22-degree halo, like a rainbow, reflecting from ice-particles in stratocirrus clouds.”
Chris Jordan
Moon with Ice Halo over the Atacama Desert, Chile, 2017
16 x 20 inches
Digital print
By exploring the reservoir of possibilities offered by popular cultural imagery, media-based communication and satire, Colin Quashie investigates serious cultural, social and political ideas and issues, with sometimes raucous, sometimes genial, tongue-in-cheek humor. On occasion, his wry, ironic, and irreverent art works disturb and/or offend the audience, the intent; to spark popular debate and discussion by forcing them to consider issues they may prefer to avoid.
Using witty, scathing sarcasm intended to spark popular debate and discussion among his viewing audience, Quashie’s art faces off against hard issues of culture, politics and race with a self-conscious awareness that often offends (or disturbs) black, white and other; he discriminates with equality and equanimity. Quashie is equal to the hard questions he raises, but often the issues are camouflaged in pop-culture imagery that confounds as well as derides the spectator. Quashie uses media-based methods to dissect and deconstruct stereotypical views of cultural relationships. This is precisely what makes his work so challenging not only to the average viewer, but to many art insiders as well. The imagery is very accessible, luring the viewer into a dialogue that then turns their preconceptions upside down.
Operating in the tradition of the French avant-garde artists, Quashie challenges the status quo mentality and functioning on frustration with the vision of the masses; a vision that he hopes to help shape and determine by raising questions that the audience might prefer to avoid. His work encompasses a conceptual element which shapes its meaning and underscores the use of art as didactic tools for society. Through the use of ‘positive’ social anger, Quashie uses his art to scrutinize the power bases of our social system, forcing us to examine our collective political perceptions. His point of view makes its mark by challenging us to be more thoughtful, expressive and more aware. With a fearless and blatant disregard for compromise, he confronts our favorite beliefs, and forces us to think about the roles we occupy in society. Recurrently controversial, his art, “…is as current as yesterday’s headlines, bold and brash like rap music…the equivalent of a three second sound byte; quick, easy and to the point.” (Dr. Leo Twiggs)
Colin Quashie: Linked was on view in the Halsey Institute galleries in winter 2019.
Colin Quashie
Sweet Jesus, 2005
17.5 x 11.5 inches
Archival digital print
About Sweet Jesus, on the “cover” of his faux ‘CQ’ magazine, Colin Quashie states that “it’s simply a witness to a historic collision. Since both sides (religion and gay rights) believe they have the right of way and refuse to yield, they’ll have to sort it out in the courts.” This painting is the first of a planned 10 part series of collisions. In between paintings, Quashie continues to finance his art as a writer.
Born in Iceland in 1970 and raised in southwestern Virginia, Joseph Burwell began to study Architecture at Savannah College of Art and Design, but changed his major to Studio Arts and received his bachelors degree at the College of Charleston in 1993. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University in 1999 and moved to New York City in 2000.
Burwell has taught at Tulane University, Loyola University, Country Day Creative Arts, New Orleans School of GlassWorks & Printmaking Studio, and Penland School of Crafts. He has participated in residencies at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, PS 122 Gallery’s Project Studio Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Studio Immersion Project.
Burwell has exhibited in New York, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Egypt, Canada, South Korea, and many venues across the U.S. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Joseph Burwell: School of the Viking Spaniard Revisited was on view at the Halsey Institute in fall 2013.
Joseph Burwell
The Theory of the Breadmaker, 2012
15 x 19.25 inches
Linocut on Saakaar Banana paper
The original photograph was featured in the exhibition DO OR DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance at the Halsey Institute in fall 2016. This piece is part of a series of four photographs of Fahamu Pecou’s Egungun Masquerade, modeled by Pecou himself.
For his body of work in the DO OR DIE exhibition, Pecou created an all-white “New World” Egungun costume, consisting of a hoodie, sweat pants, athletic shoes, a flywhisk, and a beaded cowry-shell mask. Strips of cloth with names including Martin, Trayvon, Emmett, Malcolm, etc., replaced the highly decorated lappets of garments with amulets that appear on a traditional Egungun costume. In so doing, the artist defied the finality of death by invoking the Black men and boys and permanently locating them in works of art. DO or DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance serves as one artist’s action in opposition to these overwhelming societal forces, seeking instead to elevate and re-contextualize Black life and death. Through performance, painting, drawing and video Pecou reframes our view, incorporating references from Yoruba/Ifa ritual to cultural retentions of hip-hop to the philosophy of Négritude, and through this shapes a story that seeks to affirm life via an understanding of the balance between life and death.
Fahamu Pecou is an Atlanta-based visual artist and scholar whose works combine observations on hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture. As Pecou states: “My work seeks to provide a crucial intervention in contemporary representations of Black masculinity. I began my career experimenting with the branding strategies employed in hip-hop music and entertainment. These experiments ultimately led me to question not only the stereotypes engendered by the commodification of hip-hop culture, but more, to consider how the influence of historic and social configurations of race, class and gender impact and inform these representations.”
Pecou’s work is featured in noted private and public national and international collections including; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture, Societe Generale (Paris), Nasher Museum at Duke University, The High Museum of Art, Paul R. Jones Collection, Clark Atlanta University Art Collection and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia.
Artist’s website: www.fahamupecouart.com
Fahamu Pecou
Untitled 2, 2016
13 x 14.5 inches
Archival pigment print
Pinky/MM Bass of Fairhope, AL received her BA from Agnes Scott College in 1958 and her MFA in Photography from Georgia State University in 1988. She has worked as a free-lance artist since that time. Bass lived in Mexico City for many years and organized many collaborative artists’ projects while there. Bass’s awards include an Alabama Artist Fellowship and a Southern Arts Federation/NEA grant. Her work is housed in a number of public collections and museums including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among publications in which her work is featured are The Polaroid Book, Book of Alternative Photographic Processes and Pinhole Photography.
Bass is best known for her black and white pinhole and Polaroid images, capitalizing on the mistakes and peculiarities that occur with each of these processes. The human figure has been her primary focus. Bass began stitching internal organs on the photographic image of her naked body after her cancer-stricken sister moved back to Fairhope. These intimate works were included in the winter 2008 Halsey Institute group exhibition MEND: love, life & loss. The artist is currently working with music created by the shapes and images of body cells made using the Teneriffe lace process.
Pinky Bass
SANA, 2008
13.5 x 12 inches
Archival pigment print from a 665 Polaroid negative
The subject of this image is the artist Sana Musasana. When teaching at Penland School of Crafts, Musasana saw some of Bass’s figurative work and asked if she would make a photograph of her body. Musasana, a highly respected ceramic and mixed media artist living in New York, got together with Bass and Carolyn DeMeritt, photographer from Charlotte, NC and printer of this digital image of Musasana from a scanned Polaroid negative. The three women spent a morning together to create this evocative image.
Phyllis Galembo, Professor of Photography at the University of Albany, State University of New York has been traveling the world in search of the roots of masquerade. Her work can be seen in five published books and a multitude of past solo exhibitions. Her twenty-eight year journey has taken her through North, Central and South America, Europe, and now, her most recent forays have been in the West African nations of Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. A comprehensive exhibition of her West African work was mounted in 2006 by the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in New York and is being toured by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
This image is courtesy of the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
Phyllis Galembo was a featured artist in the Halsey Institute’s Call and Response: Africa to America with artist, Nick Cave in the spring of 2010.
Phyllis Galembo
Masquerade, Gossina Village, Burkina Faso, 2006
10 x 10 image on 14 x 11 inch archival rag paper
Archival digital print
Phyllis Galembo never learns the identity of any of the masquerade participants, allowing her to focus on the aesthetics of the costume as relayed through the photograph. Her artistic aim is to collaborate with the sitter, creating a portrait of the costume and sometimes the character that the participant performs. Her use of a medium format film camera allows her to capture every nuance and detail of this vibrant and vital tradition.
Erica Harris lives in Brooklyn, New York. The history, debris, languages, and industries of her metropolis are a huge source of materials and inspiration. Harris teaches art to children, both in New York and internationally. In recent years she has facilitated projects in India, Guatemala, Macedonia, Brazil, El Salvador, Southeast Asia, and Brooklyn. Working in collaboration with communities where English is not spoken has also shaped the content of her work, particularly her relationship to language. She prefers using text—the printed word as a pattern, and often refers to how words and images are interchangeable symbols. While traveling, Harris concentrates on collecting collage material. She frequently incorporates what she sees in the streets, neighborhoods and marketplaces into the narratives of her pieces. Something very mundane and ordinary could be a symbol of safety, shelter, or peace, while simultaneously being a relic of war. It is in this context that she is drawn to the use of simple imagery.
In 2006, Erica Harris’ work was shown in the Halsey Institute’s group exhibition, Penumbra, featuring collage artists who utilize found images and combine them in ways that often surprise and illuminate.
Erica Harris
Javelina, 2010
15 x 11 inches
Linoleum block print on American Masters paper
Javelina is the first in a series of Erica Harris’ A-Z bestiary. As poet Jonathan Williams was fond of saying, “when writing a poem, it is best to start as close to the end as possible.”
A native of Delaware, multi-media artist Kendall Messick is now based in New York City. He studied photography at both the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography in New York. Messick divides his time between documentary filmmaking and extended still photography projects. In early 2001 Messick completed his first feature length, multi-media documentary project, Corapeake. The Projectionist is Messick’s second film and exhibition, which was launched in 2007. This project has already garnered critical acclaim and is currently scheduled to travel to several major institutions through 2009. Messick’s works are in numerous public collections including the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Projectionist: An exhibition and film by Kendall Messick was on view at the Halsey Institute in fall 2007.
Kendall Messick
The Vaudevillian, 2003
10 x 10 inches
Color-coupler photograph
This photograph of Gordon Brinckle, the subject of The Projectionist, shows the theatre palace creator beaming on the stage of his own Shalimar Theatre as an homage to vaudevillian performers. Brinckle was a projectionist in the US Army during World War II, and later in the Everette Theatre in Middletown, Delaware. He created his own personal rendition of a movie palace in the basement of his modest home over a forty-five year span. The Shalimar Theatre was disassembled from Brinckle’s basement and reassembled on the first floor of the Halsey Institute. Kendall Messick grew up across the street from Brinckle. At age 92, Brinckle is thrilled that his beloved Shalimar Theatre is now traveling around the country with this exhibition.
Kreg Yingst received his MA from Eastern Illinois University and his BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. After teaching art for thirteen years, he became a full-time working artist in 2003, and maintains a balance between his painting and printmaking.
Initially trained as a painter, Yingst first became interested in relief block prints when he discovered the woodcut novels of printmakers Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel. The strong graphic contrasts of light and shadow, and black and white, seemed to appeal to his aesthetic senses. He quickly delved into the work of the German Expressionists and Mexican Socialists, and perhaps have been influenced in some way by all. His block prints are carved out of wood or linoleum—a compression of cork, wood pulp, and linseed oil. He prints each block on an obsolete Showcard sign press, and the larger prints he burnishes by hand. The choice of paper and cutting style are important in trying to create the correct feel for the subject matter. His ideas are a result of his interests in narrative: story, poetry, lyric, and personal experience.
Yingst’s sideshow linocuts were part of a traveling group exhibition, Alive Inside: The Lure and Lore of the Sideshow,displayed at both the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Purdue University galleries.
Popeye, 2005
16 x 12 inches
Painted linocut
Popeye reflects a by-gone era of the intriguing and bizarre. Yingst comments, “The print is based on Popeye Perry, a sideshow character who had the amazing ability to thrust his eyeballs clean out of their sockets. It was my intention to capture the feel and nostalgia of the sideshow banner without adhering to its compositional formula.”
Nancy Marshall is a native Atlantan now living in McClellanville, South Carolina. She received her M.F.A. in Photography from Georgia State University School of Art and Design in 1996. From 1988-2004, she was Emory University Visual Arts Senior Lecturer in photography. Her work has been widely exhibited and can be found in many private and public collections, including Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts/Nexus Grant for Book Arts, the Southern Arts Foundation Fellowship for Photography, and the Emory College Excellence in Teaching Award for the Humanities, and was a fellow of the Ossabaw Island Genesis Project.
Nancy Marshall’s photographs are featured in the Contemporary Carolina Collection at Ashley River Tower, a collection curated by the Halsey Institute’s Mark Sloan. She has also participated in the Halsey Institute’s Palmetto Portraits Project, a multi-year collaboration between MUSC, the Halsey Institute, and the SC State Museum in Columbia, in which noted and emerging photographers from throughout the state of South Carolina were commissioned to make portraits of South Carolinians.
Nancy Marshall
Egret, 2010
4 x 1.5 inches
Hand-sensitized platinum-palladium contact print on Japanese Gampi Torinoko paper.
Each print is unique.
Los Angeles artist Eames Demetrios has been steadily producing Kcymaerxthaere, an epic, three-dimensional novel and the world’s largest public art project. As the “Geographer-at-Large”, he has developed an alternative universe that is largely consistent with our linear world, but with different stories, peoples, flora, fauna and physical laws. He utilizes brass plaques, strategically placed around the world, to commemorate this story. So far there are 90 installations in 18 countries.
Eames Demetrios’ Kcymaerxthaere exhibition was featured at the Halsey Institute in the summer of 2011 with artist Paolo Ventura’s Winter Stories. Demetrios was chosen to be the 2011 Quattlebaum Artist-in-residence and Kcymaerxthaere was an official visual arts offering of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival.
Penduka Women’s Collective Embroidery, 2010
12 x 16 inches
Embroidered thread on cloth panel
Eames Demetrios has created Kcymaerxthaere, an epic, multi-part, three-dimensional novel told through a global public art project. Kcymaerxthaere is an alternative universe largely consistent with this physical world, but with different stories, creatures, rules, and even laws of physics. One can think of Kcymaerxthaere as an illuminated manuscript, where every page is in a different location, and some of the illumination is provided by the sensation or knowledge of being in that place.
This series of embroidery panels has been made by a women’s collective from Namibia. Penduka was founded in the early 1990’s by Martha Muulyau, just after Namibian independence. These skilled embroiderers, many from the “San” tradition, began rendering fragments of what Eames Demetrios calls “disputed likenesses” of his stories. During the fall of 2010, Demetrios and the embroiderers worked intensively together, focusing on the imagery for three Kcymaerxthaereal legends: Culev Larsze, Eliala Mei-Ning, and Kirguellin. Through physical samples and digital connections, the process continued across the globe, resulting in (literally) otherworldly embroidery panels.
Demetrios continues to work with Penduka to create products inspired by this work as a regular source of income for their community.
John McWilliams was born in 1941 and currently resides in McClellanville. He received his the B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and is Professor/Director Emeritus of Georgia State University School of Art and Design. McWilliams has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography.
In 1988, McWilliams published Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South with the Aperture Foundation and the High Museum. He continues to work as a photographer but primarily his work is in relief printmaking and drawing.
McWilliams has been making woodcuts for about fifteen years. He comments, “I am drawn to them because the cut in wood has the expressive potential of a drawn line. A woodcut can be printed many times, compiled in a book, distributed easily and even left in unsuspected places to be discovered. At its best a woodcut is a distillation of an idea controlling the page that it sits on, an enigma.” He is able to work everyday from idea to idea, letting one lead to the next. When a theme emerges McWilliams is eager to put a group of prints into a cohesive form. McWilliams says, “My work centers me and puzzles me which sounds like a contradiction. It makes me feel alive.”
John McWilliams: Prophecies was on view at the Halsey Institute in spring of 2016.
John McWilliams
Wolf in the Creek, 2008
7.5 x 5.5 inches
Woodcut printed on Rives lightweight cream color
As John McWilliams watched the tide suck out of the creek near his home, the surface of the water suggested shapes. This predictable daily occurrence became the inspiration for Wolf in the Creek. McWilliams has been making woodcuts for about ten years. He comments, “I am drawn to them because the cut in wood has the expressive potential of a drawn line. A woodcut can be printed many times, compiled in a book, distributed easily and even left in unsuspected places to be discovered. At its best a woodcut is a distillation of an idea controlling the page that it sits on, an enigma.”
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin (Americans, b. Russia, 1951 and 1945) were founding members of the underground conceptual movement in Soviet Russia, described in their book Russian Samizdat Art. Since coming to the United States in 1980, they have had many exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Venice Biennale; the Guggenheim Museum; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Kunsthalle Bonn, Germany; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, among others. The New Orleans Museum of Art launched an exhibition of their photography, curated by Mark Sloan, which traveled to fifteen venues in North America. Their works have appeared on the covers of The New York Times Magazine, Zoom, The Sciences, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. In a special series, The Millennium, The New York Times Magazine gave the Gerlovins a feature length spread.
Their works are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Cincinnati Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Nasher Museum at Duke University, NC; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Ackland Art Museum, NC; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna among others. Their exhibition Perhappiness was featured in the Halsey Institute galleries in summer 2004.
Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin
Serpent, 1989
15 x 15 inches
Chromogenic print
Based on the play of paradoxes, their art is rich with philosophic and mythological implications, reflected in their writing. In 2012, their book Concepts was published in Russia. In the words of the artists, “Serpent is part of a series Photoglyphs. Associated with its quicksilver tongue, serpentine knowledge is both illuminating and dangerous. Such was envisioned in Serpent (1989), where it takes the form of the tongue, symbolizing among others logos spermatikos, or the fecundating word. It comes unto man as a lightning bolt of thought and speech. To penetrate its symbolism is like viewing the thick layers of a thousand slides pressed together, meanwhile our eye can distinguish only one at a time. However, one thing seems certain: that before the tongue can speak from a higher level of consciousness it first has to lose the power to wound.”
Born and living in New York City, Ruth Marten has worn several hats, in spite of the hair. From 1972 to 1980, she was an important figure in the tattoo underground, and as one of the few women practicing the craft, she influenced people’s ideas about body decoration, championing what came to be called Neo-Tribalism. Working during the Disco and Punk eras, she also tattooed in the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris.
Hired by Jean-Paul Goude for her first illustration for Esquire, she had a 30 year career illustrating for many magazines, music and book cover and is most associated with the Year in Provence books of Peter Mayle, designed for A. A. Knopf by Carol Devine Carson. She also served a brief stint as a fashion illustrator for Bergdorf Goodman, Salvatore Ferragamo, Barney’s, and Vogue magazine. That love of the printed image informs her current work: changing through overdrawing and collage the configuration and content of the 18th century copper plate engraving prints. Personal work, principally on paper, has been a constant while working in these other fields.
Since 1989, Marten has expressed herself exclusively through drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Exploring the phenomenon of hair for its sexual, cultural, and purely textural content, she exhibited work based on this obsession at Littlejohn Contemporary (NY), Adam Baumgold (NY), in the Pop Surrealism show at the Aldrich Museum (CT), Hair, Untangling a social History at the Tang Museum (NY), and Hair on Fire at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2003, she embarked upon her current interest in reworking the images and historical content of mostly 18th century prints from engravings, a body of work that has been exhibited at Isis Gallery (London, 2008) and Van der Grinten Galerie (Cologne 2013) and have been collected by the De Young Collection (SF), Charles Saatchi, Don Ed Hardy, and others. Marten continues to study the arcane and wonderfully misconstrued “truths” presented in this material and is currently working on pictures depicting esoteric Judaica and Herculaneum interiors. She teaches Watercolor Technique at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Ruth Marten
The Mimic, 2013
9.5 x 14 inches
Archival digital print
Motoi Yamamoto was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima in 1966 and received his BA from Kanazawa College of Art in 1995. He has exhibited his creations around the globe in such cities as Athens, Cologne, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toulouse. He was awarded the Philip Morris Art Award in 2002, as well as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003.
Yamamoto is best known for working with salt, often in the form of temporary, intricate, large-scale installations. Salt, a traditional symbol for purification and mourning in Japanese culture is used in funeral rituals and by sumo wrestlers before matches. It is frequently placed in small piles at the entrance to restaurants and other businesses to ward off evil spirits and to attract benevolent ones. Yamamoto forged a connection to the element while mourning the death of his sister, at the age of twenty-four, from brain cancer and began to create art out of salt in an effort to preserve his memories of her.
Yamamoto was a participant in the 2006 group exhibition Force of Nature: Site Installations by Ten Japanese Artists, cocurated by Mark Sloan and Brad Thomas, and staged at various venues throughout North and South Carolina, including the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. The artist returned to Charleston in 2012 with the exhibition Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto — a featured presentation of Spoleto Festival USA.
Motoi Yamamoto
Floating Garden, 2012
image size: 6.5 x 3.5 inches
paper size: 11.75 x 8.25 inches
Giclee on Japanese paper
Floating Garden is part of a series of studio works exploring the natural forms of the spiral. The spiral pattern is found extensively in nature. It is encoded into plants, animals, weather systems, and galaxies in the cosmos. Yamamoto is interested in the many associations people bring to this enigmatic form. Using a variety of sharp pencils, he works on a white ground created by applying acrylic gesso on wooden panels. He then photographs the resulting drawings and prints the negative of the images on Japanese paper. The choice to use both positive and negative images further reinforces the artistʼs concepts regarding the duality of life and death.
Hamid Rahmanian is a filmmaker and graphic artist. As a graphic artist for over two decades, he has received numerous awards and his work as been exhibited in international competittions and publications. Over the past five years, he has been commissioned to do work for cultural organizations and commercial companies such as The United Nations, GQ Magazine, Pacifica Radio/Democracy Now, and Aramex Shipping Company. In the last decade, his narrative documentary films have premiered at festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, and Venice, and have been televised on international networks, including PBS, Sundance Channel, IFC, Channel 4, BBC, DR2, and Al Jazeera. Rahmanian’s films have gained international recognition for their socially conscious storylines and have been used in the NGO sector to combat negative stereotypes about Iranians, to promote anti-capital punishment laws in the US, and to raise funds and awareness for the plights of disadvantaged women and girls around the world. He has recently illustrated a new edition of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, published by Quantuck Lane, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Co.
Hamid Rahmanian: Multiverse was on view at the Halsey Institute in winter 2011.
Hamid Rahmanian
Mind Zone, from the graphic novel, The Magnificant Book of M, 2009
15.75 x 11.75 inches
Archival digital print
David Boatwright has studied architecture, painting and filmmaking at the graduate and post-graduate levels and currently lives in Charleston, working actively in all three disciplines. In reflecting on his return to Charleston after time in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s he notes, “I was moving to a relatively small city with not much support for the arts or individual artists. Luckily, Charleston was beginning to wake up from a long period of cultural isolation and in recent times has become a vibrant, cultural satellite able to attract a population with a greater interest in the arts. Though I felt well placed to take advantage of this rebirth, patronage remained limited, so supporting a family required some pretty fancy footwork.”
The artist spent several years after his return running a small production company that produced documentaries and commercials. Boatwright later developed a business designing modernist houses, while continuing to paint. Designing restaurants spaces led to inside mural paintings and eventually Boatwright began producing outside signs and murals, developing this into a substantial business that allowed time and opportunity to practice his craft. Boatwright has stated, “Over time, with the growing confidence of my clients, commercial constraints have given way to a freedom to infuse the sign/mural work with personal expression. At the same time, aspects of sign painting and murals, notably textual imagery, have cross-fertilized my paintings.”
David Boatwright has created films for the Halsey Institute, created the Paper Moon backdrop for our Moon-themed membership parties, and been the presenter at several artist lectures and a Meet the Maker.
David Boatwright
I Ain’t Know, 2015
17.5 x 23.25 inches
Silkscreen print
Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. In 1985 she moved to Washington, D.C. and began to explore the roots of her African American heritage. She looks to the belief systems of African peoples and their descendants throughout the African Diaspora, as well as to the world and her immediate environment, for the inspiration to create works that encourage self-examination, self-empowerment, and self-healing. Stout created a commissioned installation in the “old” Halsey Gallery in 1996 entitled Wylie Avenue Juke. She was recently featured in the winter 2013 exhibition Tales of the Conjure Woman, a traveling exhibition organized by the Halsey Institute.
Stout has an alter ego named Fatima Mayfield who is a conjurer, rootworker, and spiritual advisor. Stout has created a vast fictional milieu which includes many imaginary characters whose lives and situations unfold in a variety of media, including painting, mixed media sculpture, photography, and installation. The recipient of awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Stout has shown her work in solo and group shows throughout the United States, and in England, Russia and the Netherlands.
Renée Stout
Marie Laveau, 2013
13 x 13 inches
Archival pigment print with hand-drawn additions
Edition of 20
While mystery surrounds her birth, life, and death, Marie Laveau is undoubtedly the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She devoted her life to helping others through her gift and practices. Even in death, she has continued to be an icon to the power of the unexplainable. Her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery #1 is covered in X’s, markings of those who have had their desires filled after asking Madame Laveau for help. Since Laveau lived in the early 19th century, there are no photographs of her. Renée Stout has conjured her visage from her own imagination.
Leslie Wayne was born in Germany and grew up in Southern California. She studied painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1970 to 1972 and earned her B.F.A. in sculpture from the Parsons School of Design in 1984. Since 1990, Wayne has been represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY. Wayne has held several solo shows at venues including the Jack Shainman Gallery; LA Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Solomon Projects, Atlanta, GA; and Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Dusseldorf, Germany. Among others, Wayne’s grants and awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant; Artists Space Exhibition grant; a Yaddo artist fellowship; Hillwood Art Museum/New York State Council on the Arts Projects Residency grant; Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant; and a Buhl Foundation Award. In 2006 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Foundation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris, France; La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; The Progressive Corporation; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, among others.
Leslie Wayne: Recent Work was on view at the Halsey Institute in spring 2011.
Leslie Wayne
After the Quake, 2010
8.25 x 11 inches
Archival digital print
After the Quake is based on a detail of Wayne’s painting entitled Before the Quake, a long horizontal image that brings to mind the impending shifts and flows of our unstable earth. Here what she focuses upon are the results of those tectonic shifts, a massive compression of time and sediment heated to a super saturation of color.
Born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island in 1929 Don ZanFagna has a degree in art, architecture, and design from the University of Michigan and a MFA in painting from the University of Southern California. During the Korean War, he served as a fighter pilot. Following his discharge, he received a Fulbright/Italian Government Grant for study in Italy, in 1956–57. In the late 1960s, after relocating from California to New York, ZanFagna chose to remove himself from the commercial art world. He was more interested in the research and process of his art than its promotion or sale. In the 1970s and ʻ80s, he was the chair of the art department at Rutgers University. The following decade, he was Visiting Eco-Architecture Professor at Pratt Institute. His works have been shown in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and in nearly two hundred exhibitions nationally and internationally. ZanFagna died in 2013.
Exhibited at the Halsey Institute in winter 2012, the Pulse Dome Project explicates the futuristic concept of “growing your own house.” Conceived in the 1970s, the artist imagined a home created, constructed, and maintained by all-organic processes and in perfect harmony with nature. ZanFagna researched world indigenous architectures, insect architecture, wombs, and such natural forms as caves, tunnels, and volcanoes, along with other structures, to learn what had been done already and what was still likely to be accomplished by others in relation to sustainable human architecture.
Don ZanFagna
Pulse Dome 28, 1977
10.75 x 14 inches
Archival digital print, 2012
Edition of 15
In Pulse Dome 28, the artist used combinations of natural and scientific elements to create a metaphorical dome house. Characteristically present are the stenciled letters, doorways, rainbow and dolmen. Test tube shapes appear to extend arms to the sky to capture wind and sun. The Pulse Dome Project remains as a testament to one manʼs attempt to apprehend a comprehensive solution to one of humanityʼs most vexing problems—sustainable shelter. The Pulse Dome Project: Art & Design by Don ZanFagna was a featured exhibition in fall 2012. This limited edition print was made from an original collage/painting by ZanFagna, and signed by the artist.
Tanja Softić works in drawing, printmaking and book media. She is recipient of the 1996 National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship, and a Soros Foundation–Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Her work is shown internationally and included in numerous collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the New York Public Library and the New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. Tanja Softić is associate professor of art at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
Tanja Softić: Migrant Universe was on view in the Halsey Institute galleries during winter 2011.
Tanja Softić
Notes on Space, 2006
18.25 x 27.5 inches
Lithograph
In Notes on Space, perspective lines of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci are superimposed over the outline of a lush and leafy landscape. The inserts are a fragment of the microscopic image of a cross-section of the orchid stem and an image of a satellite dish. The print represents a compressed view of diverse ways of comprehending the space around us and the space of drawing.
Much like Jiha Moon’s artistic enterprise, the popular blue willow pattern on china was a heavily romanticized view of China, created by 18th century British artists. It is only appropriate that Moon would commandeer this strategy in reverse. The artist’s description of the concept behind the print:
“For this print project, I wanted to create a circular image that reminds people of a ceramic blue willow plate. I have adjusted and changed many elements on the blue willow pattern and you will see unexpected images that I added such as a monster peach, peach shaped angry birds and mythical Asian dogs throughout the drawing. The blue willow pattern is a perfect example of exchanging cultures between East and West. I loved using the monochromatic color blue which is an “exotic” color to me as I think of westerners (blue eyes!). I also added “Yolo” (Internet slang for You Only Live Once) mimicking Korean Hangul that can be easily read in alphabet.”
Born and raised in Daegu, Korea, Jiha Moon lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She was featured in the fall 2015 Halsey Institute exhibition Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here.
Jiha Moon
Blue Willow Yolo, 2015
Three color screen print on paper
John McWilliams was born in 1941 and currently resides in McClellanville. He received his the B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and is Professor/Director Emeritus of Georgia State University School of Art and Design. McWilliams has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography.
In 1988, McWilliams published Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South with the Aperture Foundation and the High Museum. He continues to work as a photographer but primarily his work is in relief printmaking and drawing.
McWilliams has been making woodcuts for about fifteen years. He comments, “I am drawn to them because the cut in wood has the expressive potential of a drawn line. A woodcut can be printed many times, compiled in a book, distributed easily and even left in unsuspected places to be discovered. At its best a woodcut is a distillation of an idea controlling the page that it sits on, an enigma.” He is able to work everyday from idea to idea, letting one lead to the next. When a theme emerges McWilliams is eager to put a group of prints into a cohesive form. McWilliams says, “My work centers me and puzzles me which sounds like a contradiction. It makes me feel alive.”
John McWilliams: Prophecies was on view at the Halsey Institute in spring of 2016.
John McWilliams
Watchers Ossabaw, 2012
8.25 x 6.25 inches
Woodcut printed on Awagami paper
Edition of 20
In 2005, after pursuing photography through a B.A. at New England College and commercial work in NYC, Heather McClintock lived in northern Uganda for just under a year to focus on humanitarian relief work. There she began documenting the struggles of the Acholi and Luo tribes in the north. McClintock’s project was sponsored by Blue Earth Alliance, Seattle, WA.
For more than twenty years, a civil war in Northern Uganda has claimed women and children as its primary victims. It is estimated that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted as many as 66,000 youths, wrenching them from their families and forcing them to become soldiers, porters and sex slaves. Whilst protecting the population of the north, the Ugandan military has perpetrated its own share of massive human rights abuses. The innocent civilians affected were moved to large, squalid Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps.
McClintock’s Ugandan photographs were shown in the Halsey Institute’s exhibition, The Innocents: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda with Jonathan Torgovnick’s Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape during the spring of 2010.
Heather McClintock
Kinyera Morish, War Child Holland Paicho Child Friendly Space, 2009
11 x 14 inches
Archival digital print
This image reminds us that with suffering, there is a period of healing and cultural revival. Twelve-year-old Kinyera Morish holds a traditional wooden cattle herding spear while laying atop a play space especially made for children by an NGO (non-governmental organization) in the Paicho IDP Camp. Morish is now able to attend and enjoy regular schooling and loves to help his uncle with the cattle herd.
The first example of silhouette art can be found in the form of a hand as a cave painting in Chauvet, France dating to 33,000 BCE. There are mentions of shadow puppet techniques in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. Literally translated as “shadow”, Wayang is the general reference to traditional Indonesian theater dating back to at least 930AD. Wayang Kulit is the art of flat, intricate shadow puppets cut from leather. Wayang Klitik is the art of similar shadow puppets carved from wood. Wayang Suket, or, sometimes called Wayang Rumput is the art of creating shadow puppets from woven grass. This traditional art form is considered more of a folk art of rural Java practiced by boys that would tend buffalo or goats in the fields.
Geoffrey Cormier was commissioned by the Halsey Institute to create an evening of shadow puppet theater in 2006 with live music commissioned by the New Music Collective—including a full gamelan orchestra, and partnered with Jumaadi on a shadow puppet performance for Jumaadi: Forgive me not to miss you not in winter 2014. Michelle Van Parys recently retired from teaching photography at the College of Charleston. Her most recent book, The Way Out West, was published by The Center for American Places and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.
Geoffrey Cormier and Michelle Van Parys
Division of the Animals, 2011
17 x 11 inches
Shadowgram archival digital print
Geoffrey Cormier worked for the Jim Henson Company on two Muppet movies. There, he learned the techniques of puppetry and puppet construction. This print is the result of a collaboration between Cormier and photographer Michelle Van Parys. Borrowing from the tradition of photograms made famous by Man Ray with his Ray-O-Grams, the two artists worked to create an image that expressed the spirit of Cormier’s puppets made of sweetgrass. During a six-month investigation, they invented the genre of Shadowgram. Although technically not a shadow, and, in fact, the reverse, the Shadowgram manages to capture the dynamic contrasts of shadow puppetry.
Kathleen Robbins was born in Washington, DC and raised in the Mississippi Delta. Robbins received her MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2001. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The New Orleans Photo Alliance, The Light Factory Museum of Contemporary Photography & Film, The Weatherspoon Museum, John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, and The Southeast Museum of Photography. Robbins’ work has also been featured by Fraction Magazine, Flak Photo, Conscientious, Humble Arts New York, NPR’s Picture Show, PDN’s Photo of the Day, Oxford American, and Garden and Gun. She is represented by the Rebekah Jacob Gallery in Charleston. In 2012, she was part of the Critical Mass top 50 and she was the recipient of the 2011 PhotoNOLA Review Prize. She currently resides in Columbia, SC with her husband Ben and their son Asher, where she is an associate professor of art, coordinator of the photography program, and affiliate faculty of southern studies at the University of South Carolina.
In the fall of 2001, Robbins relocated from New Mexico to the Mississippi Delta to live on her family’s farm, Belle Chase. Shotgun House is part of her photographic series Into the Flatland, which explores familial obligation and our conflicted relationship with “home.” The photographs in this series were made during regular trips to visit her family’s farm over a period of several years.
Kathleen Robbins: Into the Flatland was on view at the Halsey Institute in fall of 2014 and she was one of 56 artists in the landmark Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South project.
Kathleen Robbins
Shotgun House, 2010
12 x 12 inches
Archival digital print
Edition of 20
