Great blog about an exhibition I was recently part of at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, including the discussion below about my piece by Deborah Krieger of Humble Arts Foundation.
"With any large group exhibition, having many different artist submissions accepted is both a curatorial blessing and a challenge. On one hand, every conceivable juxtaposition of works has the potential to tell a truly exciting story, while on the other, it can be an obstacle to figure out where some outliers should be displayed, whether they be outliers in terms of quality or subject matter. The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Members Show, up earlier this month in the Crane Building, is a good example of the logistical and artistic difficulties inherent in working with so many diverse voices, styles, and subjects, even within the singular medium of photography."
"The works are divided into roughly four different clusters in the large, airy space of the Photo Arts Center, but they don’t seem to be necessarily linked by particular photographic technique, subject matter, or even aesthetic; instead, the various themes that spring up are made present here and there amidst smaller groupings of between two and four works at a time. This decision is where the strengths of this Members Show lie, as well as within individual works themselves, even when the larger groupings don’t seem to have the same cohesion."
"A pairing of two crisp photographs by Betsey Hansell and Dore Vorum, for example, is cleverer than it initially seems. Here Comes the Sun by Vorum, is abstract, awash with slippery color residue and small air bubbles, while Hansell’s contribution, Untitled, is a more straightforward piece of nature photography, depicting a spray of green spiky leaves laid atop a ground of dry, cracked earth. Yet stepping back from the two works reveals that as different as they may seem, these two works match compositionally: both images are horizontally oriented, with a brownish form that stretches across the painting about four-fifths of the way down. Additionally, the sharp lettering on what seems to be a glass surface in Vorum’s photograph echoes the type of leaves that populate Hansell’s. This pairing is the strongest in the show overall because it does what an exhibition ought to: it makes you look hard at the works of art themselves, allowing you to see new things with each (in this case, comparative) glance."
© Doré Vorum, Here comes the sun
© Betsey Hansell, Untitled from the series Penn’s Point Corrupted
To read the complete article, click here.