Openings Connecting: REPRESENTING

Saturday, March 14, 2009

REPRESENTING

GINGER OWEN-MURAKAMI teaches at WMU, photography department, and spoke during an artbreak at the KIA tuesday....google her name to see photos of her work. Extradorinary.....and the dress/kites installation was part of a collaboration with my favorite drawing/painting teacher, Vicki VanAmeyden. go to homepages.wmich.edu/~gowen/history-installation-state.html-10K-

2 comments:

Renee HowellMarch 15, 2009 at 8:11 AM
Married NINE times! Wonder what that's all about? Money? Romance? Survival? Caring? ........
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nancy neva gaglianoMarch 15, 2009 at 10:19 AM
right!! and she's now 95, still driving, living in tampa with family close by, like next door..."spirited" i think. i'll have to ask ginger sometime...i need her hyphenated last name to post that with her work, and the kites/dress were done in collaboration with vicki, the teacher i like/have had for two classes...
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FOUR DIRECTIONS/FOUR VISIONS: Two Graces: First showing for me, JUNE 3, 2011

With no directions home, I found Taos in the late 60s. It felt like home immediately. It still does. I know this sentiment is familiar to countless others.

The mountain stopped me in my tracks, and I stayed for several years. Since that time, I circle back annually.

To me, that circle is symbolic of this body of work at Two Graces. This is a time in my life when I've been fortunate enough to experiment with art making. Not surprisingly, I found myself drawn back to the images in the Ektachrome slides that I'd taken in the early 80s of Chaco Canyon, the San Francisco de Asis Church, dusty roads, and the ever changing skies of Northern New Mexico. The spirit of this adobed land lingers in my core and manifests itself within these works.

This past Michigan winter was spent creating enlarged negatives from my thirty year old slides, pulling part of my past into the present via today's tools of scanner and computer. Using traditional silver-gelatin darkroom processes, these resurrected and modified negatives acquired a new life. The majority of these prints are the result of this mediated reincarnation.

The smaller images took me into photographic processes from the mid-1800s. These handmade platinum/palladium prints are created coating vellum, for translucency, with these metal salts and exposing them to ultraviolet light. They are then bathed in the alchemy of the darkroom. The tonal qualities are unique in each print. Finally, 24k gold is layered to the backs of the prints, emanating the warmth, glow, and depth of these beloved places.