Openings Connecting: AESTHETIC EDUCATION SUMMER INSTITUTE

Saturday, June 27, 2009

AESTHETIC EDUCATION SUMMER INSTITUTE

My annual "job" has ended.

The intense work of planning with my three partner-facilatators since April
was rewarded with the training of 22 new teachers for the program. My eighth
year of bringing new teachers "on board" since being trained at New York City's Lincoln Center for the Arts in 2001, where the program originated over 30 years ago. Kalamazoo county now has over 200 teachers and 5000 students participating,
as well as around 30 working teaching artists in visual, dance, theater, and music.
You can find out more by going the Lincoln Center's website.

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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.