Wonder
Spine
Out of Africa
Snakes in the Grass
Spine
ON VIEW: Fri, October 19 – Sat, November 21, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION: Fri, October 19 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Alternative Processes and Photo-based Prints
Featuring art by Jaime Aelavanthara, Amber Ford, Tatana Kellner, Yana Mikho-Misho, and Bellamy Printz.
Wonder blurs realism and challenges conventional photography. This exhibition features work by five contemporary artists unified by their use of alternative processes and photo-based prints including cyanotypes, photopolymer etchings, screen prints, hand colored inkjet prints on handmade paper, and silver gelatin prints on cast handmade paper.
Jaime Aelavanthara, an Assistant Professor in Photography at the University of Tampa, received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in Imaging Arts and her MFA in Photography from Louisiana Tech University. Her tea-stained cyanotypes exploring the human condition and experience with nature have been shown nationally and internationally in venues such as the Center for Fine Art Photography, The SOHO Photo Gallery in New York, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Her photographs also serve as cover art for literary works including The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, NY), and Venus in Furs (Roads Publishing, Dublin).
Amber N. Ford is a photographer/artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Ford received her BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art ’16. Primarily working in photography while occasionally exploring other mediums such at printmaking.
She is best known for her work in portraiture, which she refers to as a “collaborative engagement between photographer and sitter”. While always questioning “the truth”, Ford aims to establish a platform in which her sitter may present themselves as they please. She is interest in topics such as race, and identity.
Her work has been shown in galleries such as The Cleveland Print Room, Zygote Press, Waterloo Arts, Heights Arts & Zaina Gallery located in Cleveland, OH. Selected as a 2016 Creative Fusion Local Artist, you may find some of Ford’s work on the front of the Ohio Pasta Building at the corner of Detroit and West 32nd. Ford was recently awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2017.
Tatana Kellner is a visual artist with over 20 solo exhibitions in USA and Canada. Her practice encompasses artist’s books, printmaking, papermaking, drawing, photography and installation. She uses these media to comment on contemporary culture.
Tatana’s work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Fort Collins, Co, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, and Center for Photography at Woodstock, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA and Creative Concepts in Beacon, NY, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY and District Fine Arts Gallery, Washington, DC, among others.
Yana Mikho-Misho was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and moved to Cleveland in 2003. In Cleveland, she studied Visual Communications and Design at Cuyahoga Community College and Photography (CE) at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She has years of experience as a gallery manager. Before that, she studied Industrial Engineering at Tashkent Polytechnical Institute, and Economics through a German Organisation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Uzbekistan. She describes her approach to living and art-making by the phrase “curiosity, then efforts to capture stealing beauty, color, light, reflections, and the metaphysical moments of life.” Yana’s main medium is digital photography, and, since discovering the printmaking process through Zygote, it has given her a whole new meaning and happiness (that unforgettable moment when you’ve seen your print come alive) in expressing her art as mixed media. Her photography, prints, and collages were recently in exhibitions at the Cleveland Print Room; Riffe Gallery, Columbus; the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow and the Erarta Contemporary Art Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; artNEO and Zygote Press in Cleveland. Her works have also been displayed at TATE Modern in London and The Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, among other venues. Her works have been included in publications in the U.S., France and Russia.
Bellamy Printz' work explores issues of memory, time, and incident. The sentient experience of a moment and the physical reminder of a photograph are primary points of departure in her working process. She is an only child of only children, and so have been the recipient of hundreds of family snapshots dating back to the turn of the century. Both her father and grandfather were extremely active amateur photographers, and as a result, her interest in this type of image making has been almost genetically predispositioned. As an artist trained in printmaking, she looks to the photo as a source, rather than the end result. Through the process of discovery, manipulation and layering, she finds that her emotional and intellectual connection to the family archive increases, allowing deeper understanding of all aspects of the act of taking the shot--the objective of the taker, the gaze of the subject, and the spontaneous moments that are captured with the snap of the shutter. It is this precise moment, suspended in time that she finds most engaging. By focusing on these, I have been able to embark on a rediscovery of the snapshot.