FIVE: Suzanne Flynt, Evie Lovett, Joan O’Beirne, Christine Triebert, & Lynne Weinstein
Five years ago, the five of us started meeting to discuss work, give feedback, and bounce ideas back and forth. What began as a critique group evolved into a relationship where art and life overlap — don’t they always? — where conversations range from photo technique to losing parents and living with the aftermath of Irene. We are a source of inspiration and support for one another, and although we employ different photographic processes, there is a shared sense of presence in all of our work.
Reception: Friday, Nov. 7th – 5:30 to 8:30pm
Exhibition Dates: November 7th – 30th, 2014
Artists’ Talk: Wednesday: November 19th – 6pm (Click HERE for more information)
Suzanne Flynt
“The photograph of my mother’s momentary shadow is the one that reminds me most of her. Looking downward, she is cautious and frail, but she stands tall. The photograph inspired me to capture more shadows. My mother-in-law’s immediate response to my request was to raise her arms high while tightly holding onto her cane and large handbag. The energetic and affirmative pose defies her 90-year-old body and says much about her personality. While both women are now gone, I remember and honor them through these photographs. The other prints in the series? They celebrate family and moments in my life. While I favor nineteenth-century photographic processes, the fleeting nature of shadows forced me to set aside my early cameras and use a digital camera. With Bill Dixon’s guidance, I learned to make Van Dyke and cyanotype prints. The handwork involved with these early printmaking techniques satisfies my artistic vision. Thank you, photo gals, for inspiring me in photography and in life. Although shadows need bright light, your quiet words of encouragement brought this series to being.”
Suzanne L. Flynt traditionally works in historical processes of pinhole and wet plate collodion to create prints and tintypes. She has exhibited this work at Vermont Center for Photography, Spheris Gallery, and Hampshire College. For FIVE, she combined digital photography with 19th century kallitype (or Van Dyke) and cyanotype printmaking methods. As Curator of Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, Massachusetts, Flynt oversees an extensive archive of photographs dating from 1840 to 2000, and authored The Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographers 1885-1920; Poetry to the Earth: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Deerfield; and At Arms’ Length: The Photography of Masha Arms. She makes her home in Dummerston, Vermont.
Evie Lovett
“In December 2013, the Antarctic Heritage Trust announced that earlier that year a small box of exposed but undeveloped photographic negatives had been found in Antarctica, in Captain Scott’s Cape Evans hut. These negatives were apparently left by Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party (part of the expedition whose unrealized goal was to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent), who spent 20 months stranded when their ship blew out to sea. The negatives were brought back to New Zealand by the Trust and painstakingly conserved and developed, revealing images of vast icebergs and endless spans of ice and ocean, images never seen before, not even by the man who photographed them. Inexplicably, I felt myself deeply moved by the idea of these long unseen negatives, by a photographer long dead, coming to life in the year 2013. The man who likely took the photographs, expedition chaplain and photographer Alfred Spencer-Smith, died and was buried months before the group’s rescue. Yet these negatives—and the vistas and men’s expressions they reveal—survive. These pieces are an exploration of endurance and fragility, created with fragments of these recently discovered images and others from early Antarctic forays. They are inspired by the audacity of these men’s endeavor and my wonder that these remnants of their story remain.”
Evie Lovett is a photographer and artist who describes her work as documentary portraiture. She has photographed drag queens in Vermont; her own children; North American Indian Days on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana; the hospital in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda; Muslim Women in Paris, and more. Her latest work uses digital media and encaustic to explore self, family, memory and history. Her work can be seen at www.evielovett.com and http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/vision-voice/rainbow/. She lives in Westminster West, Vermont.
Joan O’Beirne
This installation is an evolution from earlier works in the Faces series. It is so recent that it has yet to be titled; for the purposes of this exhibit it is Untitled, from the Faces series. In this series, I look closely at anonymous faces in photographs of crowds, made by anonymous photographers. I group the faces I select by expression, direction of gaze or just the simple fact of being in the same photograph at the same time. The images are scanned and enlarged to a degree that they sometimes become unrecognizable unless viewed at a distance. What one sees on close inspection is radically different yet inherently the same as the image viewed from across the gallery. Unlike its predecessors, Untitled, from the Faces series includes a large swath of black surrounding the image. The piece is composed of approximately 1,000 squares nailed to the wall, forming a grid that fractures the image while simultaneously imposing a strict order. I see this piece as a work in progress with the potential to grow and morph into a variety of site-specific configurations.
Joan O’Beirne is an artist and educator. She currently teaches photography at Greenfield Community College. Her artwork is an ongoing exploration of the physicality of the photographic image. Her use of alternative substrate materials in many permutations has been consistent in her work since her time in graduate school. One of her series of photographs titled Onlookers employed an image transfer system that was cut into squares and reassembled onto white Plexiglas sheets. Her Extension Cord images were printed directly onto sheets of aluminum and in her “Scarf” series she delved into installation, performance and video. Along with her work at Greenfield Community College, Joan is involved with a project at the Franklin County Jail in Greenfield Massachusetts. She is currently making plans to teach classes at the jail in the near future. She has taught photography at Keene State College and the Community College of Vermont, Marlboro College, the University of New Mexico and has been a long-standing member of VCP.
Christine Triebert
The Geomorph series was inspired by the events of Tropical Storm Irene, which ravaged my home and studio on August 28, 2011. Witnessing the complete rearrangement of the local landscape from Irene’s flooding led to this project, which has served me as a way of creating order out of chaos, and beauty from destruction. When the storm ended, mounds of debris, sand, & rocks were strewn all over my property along the Rock River. In the following weeks of clean-up, I set aside certain objects of Irene’s aftermath and observed their repeating patterns. The shapes of debris, the surfaces of rocks, and patterns in the sand that seem to reflect each other in an underlying grid of line, form, color, & texture. After our studio was rebuilt, I brought my collected objects in and experimented with ways to compose, combine, and photograph them. As I work on individual images, my vision for this series unfolded. I began to see the images themselves as puzzle pieces of a graphic, movable composite map of the interplay between organic and man-made matter – both of which are subject to nature’s change. The images are printed as archival pigment prints, then varnished and flush-mounted onto wooden panels for displaying in a grid. The panels are endlessly rearrangeable, and each grouping suggests its’ own universe of interconnected, yet impermanent, elements.
Fine art photographer Christine Triebert has been working in her studio along the Rock River in South Newfane, Vermont since 1990. Her love of the rural environment is a strong influence in her photographic expression whether working in traditional, digital or cameraless processes. She is a 2014 recipient of a Vermont Arts Endowment Fund Grant, a 3-time winner of an international Golden Light Award, was included in the 2010 Spectra National Photography Triennial, and recognized by the National Photo Review. Chris exhibits in numerous galleries and shows throughout the Northeast. She is represented by the Rice/Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA and by Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her work has been featured in Art World News and her prints are purchased by many corporate and private collectors including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bank of America, Polo Ralph Lauren, and The Ritz Carlton Hotel. Many of her images have been licensed by major publishers including Graphique de France, Boston; Aperture, NY; and The Art Group, UK. Chris has deep connections to the local arts community. She has taught workshops and served on the board of both the Vermont Center for Photography and the In-Sight Photography Project; is a former trustee of the Arts Council of Windham County; and is a founding member of the Rock River Artists group, now in it 22nd year.
Lynne Weinstein
Photographs condense time into a moment–one expression stilled forever. Each image, each portrait, is a map. These portraits are of my friends: women, all in their fifties, some of whom I have know for 45 years. I chose to photograph only women in their fifties as an acknowledgment of the distance traveled to this age and of the introspection that occurs when we round the half-century point. The images are taken with a 4 x 5 view camera film camera and shot only inches from the face. They document our trust, our honesty and our wise acceptance of who we are. They are taken and shared with great respect and love.
Lynne Weinstein is a photographer and teacher. She has made imagery for the majority of her 50 some odd years. Previous portfolios include Nature’s Bounty, Botanicals and Domestic Pleasures. Her work has been supported by the Vermont Arts Council and The Vermont Community Foundation Arts Fund. Before teaching at The Putney School, Lynne was a long time volunteer at The In-Sight Photography Project, a photo editor at Life Magazine and a freelance editorial photographer. For many of her projects she uses a 4 x 5 film camera and enjoys the slow arduous nature of the medium. For Lynne, the 4 x 5 inspires a mindfulness that is the essence of her love for photography. Lynne lives in Putney, Vermont.