Art Reception: Photo Engagement Project
The Photo Engagement Project group exhibit will be on display in the library’s Community Room throughout the month of April. Please join us for an artist reception on Saturday, April 16th, 3-4:30pm. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.
About the exhibit:
The Photo Engagement Project was formed during the pandemic to connect people, either partially or completely isolated, over their mutual enthusiasm for photography.
Melissa Knowles is a photographer, curator, and teaching artist who believes photography can be an incredible service to us all, a kind of spiritual nourishment, creative activism, and antidote, even to our most pressing global crises.
With a background in education, children’s rights, and arts-in-health, her graduate research in Visual Anthropology explores the relationship between the arts, healing, human/nature rights, and spirituality. Her work advocates a paradigm shift to fully integrate the arts into activities that advance individual and collective health and wellbeing.
Wintering is a series of photographs, and practice for the more challenging moments of our lives, when the landscape shorn of color asks us to search for a different kind of beauty. For Melissa, beauty is the sensing of spirit in all things, animate and so-called inanimate, and can be found in the imperfection emanating from the language of stone, rust, and sidewalk; a shifting, shoaling shoreline of constant tidal motion; or the personal world of a crocus flower that helps us to reimagine the Spring within our depths.
Photography, art history, and horticulture have been passionate mainstays for Helene Barr’s long life. Her interest began with a family road trip from Connecticut to Miami Beach when she was six years old, and was cemented when leading a six-week European tour, as a Girl Scout leader, after high school graduation.
She feels fortunate to have pursued the life of a floral designer, floral design teacher, and writer for a gardening column in her hometown newspaper.
Philippe Sommer has been photographing and using a darkroom since he was 13. In college, he studied with Bill Arnold and David Batchelder, who opened his world to the Zone System and the possibilities of a compelling photo and a beautiful print. Though his career was not in Photography, he never stopped photographing, taking classes with Amy Arbus, Harvey Stein, Lester Lefkowitz, Craig Stevens, and a 6-month mentorship with Allison Shaw.
“Beach Finds” is a series of photographs of objects found on Martha’s Vineyard isolated on a black background to focus the viewer on its details. All the objects have been battered by the sea. Some of these photographs show the beauty of that wear, while others also seek to conjure “Equivalence.” His digital collages “explore what could be.”