January 28 – March 4, 2022
Reception & Gallery Talk: Friday, February 10, 6 – 8pm
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Torpedo Factory Art Center presents Beyond the Frame: A Contemporary Exploration of Mixed Media Photography. The goal of this exhibition is to highlight how artists are experimenting with what photography is capable of – beyond its traditional framed presentation on the wall.
JUROR’S STATEMENT
SIOBHAN RIGG
“Photographs represent moments of time and space separated from the flow of the world. Deciding where the edges of this separation should be placed is critical to how the image will be seen. The edges frame the image and locate it within its own reality. The resulting enclosure is one of the most powerful aspects of its potential for meaning. The goal for the Beyond the Frame exhibition is to highlight how artists are experimenting with the possibilities of photography beyond this traditional, framed presentation.
Photography still holds on to a direct relationship to the world despite the ubiquity of editing and manipulation. It carries a sense that everything depicted in the image is happening in the fraction of a second that the shutter clicked open. Even if just for a second, we tend to at least initially assume that the image depicted was in front of the lens.
Because of that relationship, photographs make a kind of truth claim that what is represented in the image was present. The photographic frame makes a claim to the singularity of the moment – and by extension – to the unity of reality and identity. These truth claims lie at the heart of photographic indexicality.
The artists in this exhibition disrupt the frame in order to explore the many ways in which realities and experiences are multiple. Their methods are varied. Some fragment the subject. Others multiply the frame in capturing a single subject. Some intervene in the image using physical materials while others create images from fragmented substances. VR and 3d capture dislodge the edges of the two-dimensional image entirely. Taken together, these artists reconnect photography with the complexity of the world just outside the frame.”
-Siobhan Rigg
About the Juror
Siobhan Rigg is an Associate Professor of Studio Arts and currently also serves as Program Head of Design at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of Arts & Design. Rigg is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and writer whose creative and research interests center on social and environmental micro-histories. Their work is concerned, most immediately with the ways toxic legacies are distributed within the built environment, and more broadly, with theoretical and material explorations of governance and land use. Rigg teaches across the areas of studio arts, time-based media, and social practice at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Veronica Sloan (Gaithersburg, MD), To A Journey, 2018. C41 and E6 (Cross process) Photographic Collage. $963
“To me, photography is storytelling and the perfect expression of art and science- visual storytelling and chemistry- chiaroscuro and HDR. Stories can be created in a single image or as a series of images. With images created in camera before digital editing or DSLR cameras were available, I shot a roll of C41 color print film. I then shot 2 rolls of E6 slide film of which 1 was processed normally, the other was processed as C41. Pieces from both rolls were hand cut, collaged with transparent tape and glue stick (No Frame), re-photographed in E6 at different angles, photographed on a light table with a digital camera, and finally reshaped as a perfect square rather than the traditional 3x2 dimensions of the photograph. Essentially pulling the frame apart with each step in the process to create a visual story and taking the viewer ‘beyond the frame’.”
–Veronica Sloan
Catherine Day (McLean, VA), Plume & Light, 2019. Multilayered digital pigment prints on assembled layers of a unique linen & silk organza. $900
“I use silks & antique linens as materials in printing, to depict loss, the fragile nature of memory, & to underscore the human mark made on our environment. I print the top one or more layers on translucent silk. The bottom layer is printed on an antique linen. Made during the late 1800s through the 1940s, the tablecloths, centerpieces, doilies, etc. have beautiful edges, embroidered textures, and 'cutwork' open areas. Their beautiful detail, laboriously created by unknown women, touches me. The multiple layers in each work shift and move in air currents, changing the focus & intensity of the image. Using these non-traditional materials to print on allows me to create a dreamlike landscape. It causes the piece to constantly change, as memory and life often do.”
–Catherine Day
Heather Beardsley (Virginia Beach, VA), Strange Plants, Virginia Beach I-III, 2022. Embroidery on Found Photography. $500
“In 2017 I visited Pripyat, the ghost town closest to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Over the past thirty years nature destroyed by human hubris and incompetence has grown up to dominate the abandoned man-made structures. I began to embroider plants overtaking the people and buildings onto photographs of Budapest, the city I was living in. Since then, I have added images to this series with each new city my art has taken me to, including Vienna, Beijing, Chicago, Kyiv and Las Vegas. Although presented in a whimsical fashion, using an intimate scale and a 'feminine' craft technique like embroidery, on closer examination the implications of these pieces become more sinister. As plants grow uncontrollably through the buildings and streets, people are either absent or oblivious to the situation: a shift in the dynamic has occurred but nature has fought back, and new life has grown up.”
–Heather Beardsley
Tyler Grimes (Baltimore, MD), Herding the Gaze Away from the Pasture, 2021. VR + multimedia video installation. NFS
“In this reality, the spectator is given the opportunity to observe their own perceptions in an art gallery containing rendered versions of natural resources. Along with analog TVs and reflective surfaces, these same objects are repeated in the context of a virtual art gallery. Once within the virtual space, the spectator is greeted by a mediated view of their real self through the utilization of a live video-feed mechanism. This installation intends to manifest a liminal space in which the spectator might reflect on their relations to the earth's very real resources and the systems of value placed on such through the recontextualization of the implied value of the art gallery space. In doing so, the work hopes to foster a self-reflective experience for social change, conversation, and contemplation by probing both the nature of reality and the reality of nature through shedding a light of mindfulness as to how media technologies might productively redirect a distracted gaze.
I believe this piece is in conversation with the goals of this exhibition because it provides commentary to the ways in which we have historically produced images of ourselves, the environment, and ourselves in the environment. As the technologies associated with the production of such imagery evolve, our means to depict and capture 'reality' continue to coevolve alongside our perception - including classical pastoral paintings, photography, moving images, and emerging mediums such as Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence (A.I), and 3D Printing workflows that reach beyond the frame. Throughout both gallery spaces (the real-world space and its virtual counterpart) there are frames of such depictions, some of which are perpetually changing animations generated using A.I.”
–Tyler Grimes
Stefani Byrd (Wilmington, NC), Lidar.v001 : Full View, 2020. Digital photographic print on metal made with LIDAR scanner. $700
“Home is most often seen as a refuge, a place of respite, a destination, and a goal. Domestic spaces are some of the most familiar places we inhabit, but rarely are they deemed worthy of meticulous consideration. This work utilizes my own domestic life as source material for an intimate visual study of form and space using 3D scanning technology. domicile explores how the pandemic and the need to quarantine has changed our collective relationship to home, shifting it from a refuge to also that of a confine. The boundary of the home is one that protects, but also restricts. This work embraces the creative challenges and limitations of confinement by using an emerging form of technology for the hyper-documentation of what is seen everyday but rarely noticed.”
–Stefani Byrd
Stefani Byrd (Wilmington, NC), Texture Map.v002, 2020. Digital Photographic Print on Metal made with LIDAR Scanner. $900
“Home is most often seen as a refuge, a place of respite, a destination, and a goal. Domestic spaces are some of the most familiar places we inhabit, but rarely are they deemed worthy of meticulous consideration. This work utilizes my own domestic life as source material for an intimate visual study of form and space using 3D scanning technology. domicile explores how the pandemic and the need to quarantine have changed our collective relationship to home, shifting it from a refuge to also that of a confine. The boundary of the home is one that protects, but also restricts. This work embraces the creative challenges and limitations of confinement by using an emerging form of technology for the hyper-documentation of what is seen every day but rarely noticed.”
–Stefani Byrd
James Leach (Edmonds, WA),(Plant in the Wall 8) A Russian mathematician describing cube theory with silverware, 2022. Archival Inkjet Print. $400
“Plant 8 is part of a series of images with text. Each piece depicts a plant stuck in a wall cavity after a hole has been cut in drywall. Is the plant in the wall the same as that same plant on the sill?”
–James Leach
Sarah Hood Salomon (Germantown, MD) Photo Croquet, 2022. Pureed photographs, ink from sanded photographs, resin. $3500
“My current work questions the meaning, dimension, and physical qualities of the photograph. I begin by sanding the ink off the paper, breaking the image into two basic elements: ink and paper. I purée the paper and reduce it to pulp. The photograph now exists as piles of pulp and ink filings and is free to become something entirely different. A photograph is vulnerable to decay, but by encasing its elements in resin, the evidence of the image is forever suspended in sculptural form.”
–Sarah Hood Salomon
K Sarrantonio (Brooklyn, NY), Night Before Birth II, 2022. Screen-print, mason stain, ceramic tile (fired, unglazed). $4500
“Embracing the personal as political, this work explores the tension between the need for visibility and the risks of exposure inherent in the experience of nonbinary gestational parenthood and queer family life. As a printmaker and photographer, I am interested in pushing the boundary of the two-dimensional image. By screen-printing onto many individual tiles with large dot patterns, I transfer the images to objects, giving them weight and allowing them to take up more space in the room. The use of tile as the substrate recalls the home and interior spaces. The meticulous and tedious process of assembling the pieces, references the work of parents and caregivers. Through this practice, I am considering the ways in which artists are uniquely positioned to build new gender realities and futures.”
–K Sarrantonio
James Leach (Edmonds, WA), Environment 3, 2022. Archival Inkjet Print. $500
“Part of a series, these are color digital photographs. I do minimal editing for the prints. A series of 35 mm prints are underway, but still in process. The self can be a strange and distant place."
Several possibilities:
a) You are in the Landscape.
b) You are part of the landscape.
c) You created the landscape.
d) You are the landscape.
–James Leach
Lauren Bertelson (West Palm Beach,FL), Mary (Scars), 2022. Inkjet Print on Cotton, Cotton Thread, Polyester Yarn. $10,000
“Mary (Scars) is a photograph from my family archive printed on a piece of cotton. My grandmother, 30+ years ago, scratched herself out of all the slides she could find at the time, and to highlight that violence,I embroidered over the image tracing some of the same lines. The bright pink thread stands out against the cream background, creating a palpable sense of violence while suggesting the appearance of freshly healed scars. With the intervention of embroidery, this work no longer fits squarely into the category of a photograph, but becomes an object that lies somewhere on the spectrum of both photography and fiber art.”
–Lauren Bertelson
Matthew Conradt (Brooklyn, NY), We Didn’t Even Count the Hours, 2019. Photo-transfer collage on Mylar. $4900
“I am inspired by situationist ideas and the inherent unreality of our image saturated culture. Appropriating photos from newspapers, magazines, and the internet, I recombine the photos digitally, print them out on photo paper and then photo-transfer the resulting image onto Mylar. During this process the images are altered, repeating elements, eliminating parts, or obliterating the image entirely, changing their context. All the work in this application is from a series where the appropriated photos came from wealthy lifestyle and fashion magazines. The resulting images are both inviting and unnerving vignettes that engages with the language of photography to call to mind the artifice of the narratives presented in the imagery we consume daily.”
–Matthew Conradt
Samantha Jensen (Brooklyn, NY), Portrait of Carlos, 2022. Ilford Photo Paper Collage. $1,700
SOLD
“In my photographic practice, I shy away from the ‘perfect’ image, and seek out ways to add a bit more visual chaos to the image. I find that imperfection, as opposed to a polished image, tells a more realistic story. I've became interested in the concept that one image could tell more than one story, which is when I began working on these portrait collages (collaged portraits of one person, using photographs from different angles and distances, with a variety of facial expressions). While a single image can tell a story, I like the idea that a single portrait of someone can show them in a multitude of ways. I connect them with surrealism because they are simple, but also unexpected. The expressions of the eyes and the mouth often juxtapose each other, and the collages defy the idea that one photograph can represent an individual’s full identity.”
–Samantha Jensen
Haylee Anne (Atlanta, GA), Untitled Memory (Spring), 2022. Scanned polaroid, multiple exposure. $300
Haylee Anne (Atlanta, GA) Untitled Memory (Winter), 2022. Scanned Polaroid, Multiple Exposure. $300 SOLD
“Haylee Anne is Atlanta-based disabled artist who makes process-oriented imagery. Her dreamy photographs of found materials are meticulously constructed, using color, exposure, and intuitively curated objects. At the core, her work is imagery, collecting, and transcribing. The layers within her images often include memory objects, flowers, natural detritus, glitter, et al. Within the assemblages, Haylee Anne examines the economics of health, disability, queer identity, and family.”
–Haylee Anne
ABOUT TARGET GALLERY
Target Gallery is the contemporary exhibition space of Torpedo Factory Art Center, managed by the City of Alexandria's Office of the Arts, a division of the Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities.
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