SOLO EXHIBIT AWARDS

Elin Lennox's large, abstract photographs seem simultaneously familiar and disorienting. They evoke the traditions of abstract painting, and the aesthetics of microscopic imaging, Hubble space images, and landscapes. They are shot on film, then printed digitally after minimal color adjustment. The photos are straightforward documents of ephemeral constructions, ones that function in limbo between painting, photography, and scultpture.

Elin Lennox was born and raised in rural Northern California. She studied painting at Santa Rosa Junior College before attending Carnegie Mellon University where she recieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She now lives and works in Pittsburgh. She has received an Emerging Photographers Grant from Pittsburgh Filmmakers, was a Brooks Fellow at Anderson Ranch, and is the current featured artist of the Open Thread Regional Review. Her work was previously exhibited at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, Fe Gallery, and the New York Art Book Fair.

Memory in the age of digital experience.
Artists: Ben Hernstrom and Frank Ferraro

Many of our individual memories are now part of the public realm. Digital technology such as (cell phones, computers, cameras) have created a method along with an arena to share our experiences (no matter how personal or banal). Experiences are captured and transmitted as digital information available to anyone with the technology to experience it.

RECALL investigates how these issues influence how we experience and remember our daily lives and the lives of others. RECALL is a site specific, large-scale, immersive audio / video installation that utilizes a multi-video projection system along with pre-recorded sound designed to initiate and investigate interactions between human experience, digital documentation, reproduction and dissemination and how these components relate to or effect memory.

The site specific installation RECALL, will utilize 3 video projectors, which will project 3 separate videos (created by Ben Hernstrom) onto the gallery walls. The imagery will focus on themes of intimacy, place, family, and time and will be comprised of High Definition digital video, low fidelity analogue video, and cell phone videos.

In addition to these projections, RECALL will feature an original electro-acoustic sound composition (composed by Frank Ferraro). The audio composition is not a direct soundtrack to the videos, but an aural record of collected memories made from field recordings, found sounds and ambient musical arrangements. Filmmaker Ben Hernstrom and multi-disciplinary artist Frank Ferraro have collaborated on several projects over the course of the last 3 years. Most recently, Mr. Hernstrom was a part of the production team for gravity + grace, a performance at the Hillman Performing Arts Center, written and produced by Mr. Ferraro. They have also collaborated on video projects, a lecture series, and are currently producing a feature length documentary.

Biography: Benjamin Hernstrom
Ben Hernstrom attended the University of Pittsburgh from 2001 to 2005, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in Film Studies and German. Soon after, he formed Ambulantic, a video production company. With Ambulantic, he has produced documentaries, music videos, experimental works, video installations, and short narratives, including segments for the cable channel Current TV. He has produced roughly fifty videos from 2004 to 2010. Ben’s most recent work is Vazaha (Foreigner), a documentary shot in Madagascar in the summer of 2008. He is currently producing a video series on young artists, writers, performers and entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh entitled Young Creatives and a feature length documentary entitled Bar Band.

In 2008, Ben received an individual artist fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for Media Arts: Narrative.

Biography : Frank Ferraro
Frank Ferraro is a multi-disciplinary artist, working individually and collaboratively in sculpture, painting, installation, video and sound arts. In 1997, Mr. Ferraro, as a member of the SOCIETY OF SCULPTORS (SOS), received a juried award in the SOS group show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, where art critic Graham Shearing referred to Mr. Ferraro’s sculptures as “executed with an unselfish economy” and “exceptional.” In 2001, he was part of a two-person show titled MASSIVITY at the Boxheart Gallery. In 2003, he joined forces with the Junction Dance Theater acting as a visual art director. The second of the two JDT projects titled FORGET / EVERYTHING was selected by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as one of the top ten most visually stunning stage performances of 2003.

Mr. Ferraro received a Sprout Foundation Grant in 2004 to develop a study of the urban soundscape known as acoustic-ecology. Gathering a community of local urban planners, audiologists, city politicians and architects, Mr. Ferraro held the very first sound symposium on Pittsburgh’s South Side. The four-hour event, programmed by Mr. Ferraro, featured guest lecturers, demonstrations and an open community forum with local residents voicing their emotional and physical reactions to the changing urban soundscape in their city neighborhoods. In 2003, he formed a collaborative partnership with composer/performance artist Stephen Pellegrino. Their projects, 4 Quarters and Calling Mr. Conrad premiered at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2005 and 2006. He was invited by WYEP radio as the featured artist on their series, Allegheny Front, to discuss his sound installation work AKUSMA. Mr. Ferraro’s work can be seen at the Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago, SPACES in Cleveland Ohio, the feature film
DOGMA as well as MusicWorks magazine.

ELIZABETH MOONEY
www.elizabethmooney.com

In my artwork I employ a combination of painting, performance, and kinetic sculpture. The work considers both the effect of optical devices on the perception of nature and the speed at which landscape is experienced. Whether seen through a train window or on television, our physical contact with the natural world is distanced, despite the fast pace at which it is experienced.
    
My most recent body of work continues my dialogue between nature, optics and abstraction. I invite viewers to experience and observe nature through a conceptual visual language, by using both static and moving scenic landscapes.  My paintings consist of segments of silhouetted mountains and treetops interlaced within intricate line work and playful, abstract imagery, creating an environment of fragmented space. The sculptures are proposed tools for viewing and experiencing space.
   
I am inspired by traditional landscape painting and viewing devices used by artists of the 18th and 19th century. These devices attempted to accent and alter the landscape in order to present a more picturesque space. In my work, I question traditional ideologies of beauty within landscape.  I am also critical of the accelerated pace of our experiences with nature.  I present viewers with an abstracted vantage of place and space in an attempt to challenge our ideas of beauty within landscape. My intent with my work is to challenge viewers to reconsider how they engage with nature and the pace at which they experience it.

Works in the exhibition:
The exhibition Shifting Panoramas consists of a new body of work by Elizabeth Mooney that addresses the accelerated state of peoples’ relationship to the world around them.  These paintings and kinetic sculptures stem from the artist’s research in traditional landscape painting and viewing devices of the past.   Mooney’s work questions how we experience and observe nature through a conceptual visual language, by using both static and moving scenic landscapes.

Bio:
ELIZABETH MOONEY is an artist originally from Boston Massachusetts and currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  She received her Masters Degree in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2007. She studied as an undergraduate at the Lorenzo De Medici School in Florence Italy and received her BFA in painting and printmaking from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.  Elizabeth has attended residencies at La Cipressaia in Montagnana, Italy in 2001 and 2003.  She has worked as an artist assistant for Michael Mazur in Cambridge Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of a 2009-2010 Visual Arts Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Massachusetts.  She is currently represented by Michael Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Thea Augustina Eck’s work has been shown nationally and internationally in such spaces as the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA and the Arctic Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Eck received her BAFA from Alfred University and the New York State School for Ceramics and her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. She received two Rackham Graduate School grants to do archive research in England, Norway and Denmark on 19th century Arctic/Antarctic exploratory history. The School of Art & Design awarded her the Redstone/Dybvig Award in 2008. From 2008-2009, Eck completed a fellowship in Copenhagen, Denmark made possible by the American-Scandinavian Foundation and Lois Roth Endowment. Her final exhibition, Angalavaa: An Archive Tale, received an artist grant from the United States Embassy in Denmark. Eck’s work was featured in a solo show at Cazenovia College, NY in October 2009 and the 1708 Gallery, VA is currently hosting a solo show.

Inisiaqpunga and the waking  :  Thea Augustina Eck:

I see my work as a Jules Verne novel inspired by exploration stories surrounding the Arctic and Antarctic. By investigating archives and other accounts, I use my historic imagination to combine the role of the historian with the privilege of the artist. These northern and southern spaces have existed both in the fact and the memoir, the fiction and the reverie. They contain encounters and tragedy, intangible phenomena, and deeply brooding emotions. I am drawn to their epic narratives, portrayed by both the insider and the outsider. The outcome encompasses photography, sculpture, drawing and writing.

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
Book of Job, the Bible

Inisiaqpunga and the waking scours archived documentary, poetic inventions, and phantasms of personal imagination. The installation reflects on a lonesome wandering, high in the Arctic, in search of ghosts left from the famed Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. Sent as the largest and most technically advanced of its time, the British expedition sought to finalize the Northwest Passage to the Pacific as well as to obtain calculations around magnetic north pole. The story pauses on the deathly silence of the entire 133-member crew by 1847, and gathers momentum as search and rescue expeditions spilled into the Arctic seeking clues.

Just as the ice covers, it reveals

Over 150 years seasonal freezing and thawing hid and uncovered objects and tragic histories surrounding the expedition’s fate. And as a result, the threaded fingers of a map filled up with intricate coastlines, Inuit populations encountered, and inventions and communication methods appropriated or generated. The western shroud over the Arctic was rent from the globe.

Not here, the white north has thy bones

In the Inuktitut language, inisiaqpunga describes the act of following a lone trail left by an occasional traveler. Inisiaqpunga and the waking seeks not to retell but rather to pursue the emotional voice, the soliloquy and lament, for a tragic narrative.

In my youth, I spent many hours with my nose in a comic book completely intrigued by the use of light and shadow. My interest was not focused on what was happening to the heroes and villains, but on the environments filled with darkness and small hints of light. Most of the scenes used modest portions of light to show a contour or nothing at all. An empty space with an open door casting a long shadow would give the viewer the ability to create their own understanding of what was happening. This is also a common characteristic found in film noir. The sets of these films expressed dour characters performing deeds with stark lighting. Again, I saw that the lack of light gave the viewer no less understanding of the scene. These films tapped into our basic understanding of our fears. They didn’t so much invent these fears, but discovered them and employed a simple use of lights to feed them. We knew how the events were to play out and we needed very little to understand what was happening.

It is in this series that I am attempting to recreate my own understanding and memory of how these scenes would play out. I do not wish to trick the human eye to think it is watching a film still; I would rather let them understand what I am constructing. Each image is not completely convincing, and leaving it so, the audience gets to step back and consider their own understanding of these lighting techniques, plots, and use of cinematography. By doing this I hope to help understand why our memory of a cinema brand still helps us translate images today. The bright light at the end of a dark hallway is not actually startling to us without our assumptions of what is going to happen next. I believe that film and illustration have completely inundated our knowledge of ominous images, and this carries through to our lives outside of the theaters.