Lynette Miller

Artist Statement:
My approach art making is an ongoing method of inquiry; its intent is to draw attention to ideas, situations and process. I cite Dadaist collage, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus tradition of experimentation as major influences.

This image is from body of work concerning an exploration of knowledge systems, combining iconic representations of religious art with anatomical studies, scientific schematics, geometrical constructions, astronomy and mathematical diagrams. It reflects my interest in current arguments between faith and technology, and the historical conflicts between science and religion.

The questions my images might elicit are of more concern to me than the answers. Questions may result in conversation; a conversation is communication, which may increase awareness or understanding - the ultimate encouragement to continue making art.

Bio:
Lynette Miller has an M.F.A. in Photography (minor in Printmaking) from SUNY Buffalo. While in Buffalo she taught photography at Niagara University and served on the CEPA (Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art) Gallery’s board of directors. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous awards. This past spring she curated Smart Art: Images from the Digital Universe, at the Upstairs Gallery in Tryon, NC, which showcased the many ways in which digital applications are being used by contemporary artists.

Lynette currently teaches Digital Photography at A-B Technical Community College while maintaining her studio near Asheville, NC. You can see more of her work on LCMillerStudios.com

Donna Callighan

Donna Callighan, considering herself a member of the Cultural Creatives, seeks to express through the universal language of sight, the global environmental issues at hand, and to honor nature with all of it’s perfection. She has even adopted the brand name, donna-terra, to signify her commitment to the natural world.

Through her work she seeks to explore Man’s Hand on Nature as an underlying theme. The image in this exhibition, Up!, is one of a thirty-two piece series titled, S.O.S. a visual / commentary on our continual path towards committing ecocide, for which she is currently seeking funding to produce the exhibition. The fact that this exhibiton is titled, Hands Off! is pure coincidence.

She was inspired to create this style of imagery during a walk down a side street in Paris while on a commercial assignment in 2002, where she spotted a back lit potted palm frond pressing up against a piece of special architectural glass. Upon her return she procured a piece of this glass, and began to explore personification of nature with flowers and the beauty of shadows. Further investigations with this technique have lead to discovering interesting and energetic abstractions and expressiveness by using human elements.

Thanks to the powerful tool Adobe Photoshop, she is able to creatively enhance the color of these digitally captured images to suit the mood of each piece, without the use of pre-set software filters. The painterly ‘look’ is created by the glass’s structure. Thus the images begin to visually cross the border between photography and other fine art techniques. Then by printing them on canvas and fine art papers, that line is even more blurred, a fact that has become apparent when viewers ask, “Is this a painting or watercolor?”

Now, after years of searching, Donna has found her own unique style. She has several exhibition ideas that she passionately wishes to explore. Additional bodies of work include, Foggy Florals, Seeds, Trees and Weeds, and Mirror Montages. She is currently working on producing, The Language of Trees.

Donna has been a successful professional photographer for over twenty years. She is currently reassessing how to contribute to our world in a manner that allows her spirit to rest, and more importantly, contributes to environmental awareness and the betterment of others.

Visit Donna's website at www.donna-terra.com

Pauline Thomas

I am an axis approved professional artist living in Ferryside near Carmarthen, west Wales. Axis is the listing for professional artists who live and work in the UK, funded by the Arts Council's of England Scotland and Wales.

My inspiration is drawn from my life in west Wales, my work in the agricultural sector and working within the changing landscape, weather and rhythm of the rural way of life. Other works have been inspired by the folklore and history of the surrounding communities tempered by my personal experiences and emotions. I am totally self-taught through 20 years of self-expression in the mediums of paint, pencil, clay and flora. This has allowed my work to develop outside the confines of convention and produce works of true originality.

My work is currently displayed at www.eccowales.com, a government established portal for showing The Best Arts and Crafts in Wales, in the fine art section and www.wallscapes.biz

Thomas Wolf

Artist Statement:
Like all artists I want to share my vision of life, beauty, love, pain, reality. . .But through my eyes, the vision is a bit skewed because of a retinal disease. My picture of the world gets smaller and smaller everyday but my minds eye grows with vision and passion for life, beauty, love, pain, and reality. . .

Because of my vision the medium I have chosen is my prosthetic. Technology has finally caught up to my long loved medium: Mixed Media/Digital Photography. Pulling in my skills from life drawing, acrylic, oil, sculpture, photography and mixing them for a composition in a digital controlled environment settles that burning inside of me. Microchips, lasers, and electricity allows my emotional outpour to be released. Skeptics scoff at Digital Art, and I am sure that photographers were scoffed at from the masters. My work as a whole has developed as my life has, and as life does, so will my work.

This series and my current work consist of a mourning period of love and opportunities missed and lost. Each of the pieces herein consist of imagery: water, eyes, doors, and blurriness. All are connected. Eyes opening the door to the soul, letting in, they see you more clearly, leaving you exposed, unable to shut it again.

Stephanie Fysh

Stephanie Fysh comes to photography with a childhood aversion to cameras and a PhD-induced penchant for aesthetic theory: her photography training—at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, and in a variety of workshop settings—came after years immersed in eighteenth-century literary culture and its material conditions.

She has exhibited as part of the Gladstone Hotel’s “Urban Optics” in the 2006 CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival , and in the Gladstone’s juried show “PHOTO Fiction” in CONTACT 2007. Her work is held in private collections across North America. She has been published in Scroope (the journal of the Cambridge University graduate school of architecture), in JPG Magazine, and on fine-art-quality local postcards by Toronto’s Ballenford Books on Architecture. Interviews with Stephanie appear on the photography website Utata and at poet Sina Queyras's Lemon Hound: Contemporary Arts & Letters, Interviews & Features.

She currently lives in downtown Toronto, where she works in the book publishing industry as a freelance editor/proofreader, publishing educator, and director of the Book and Periodical Council.

Statement

My photography—architectural vistas and details, cinematic and erotic portraiture, and beyond— continues an exploration I began as a literary-historical scholar: of the relationship between the physical structures we build, the culture we weave, and the selves we construct within those physical and cultural spaces. At times this exploration masks itself in the entirely fictive but still recognizably photographic; at others it takes on the cloak of the documentary.

I currently create primarily digital images but retain a degree of nostalgia for film and the smells of the darkroom. I learned in that darkroom that light is not the only material for photography: the image created in bending and capturing that light is itself material for transformation. Today I carefully choose when I will let the inevitability of technological mediation show itself and when I will give in to the ideology of photographic immediacy.

In tracing, bending to shape, and making material envisioned moments of sublimity, both large-scale and intimate, intended and unintended, I seek to illuminate the equivalent possibilities of the conscious construction of self—of a personal sublime—and of an erotics of the built world. Or at least to make you look up.

To see more of Stephanie's work visit www.stephaniefysh.com

John Wall

My work is drawn from my experience of people and things in rural and urban settings as they interact with me and with each other. I seek through art to engage the world with generosity and compassion. I look for moments that embody creativity in the construction and performance of the world and that result in images that will hold the viewer’s attention. I seek images that incorporate a tension between form and content and that extend the composition to include the viewer’s world.

My work is about time, about the recognition of a moment of composure in the ebb and flow of things and events. Each image brings back the moment of recognition but also records the loss of all the moments before and after. In the midst of loss, I hold on to the moments that make the past accessible. I make images from chance and random encounters, from writing and images on walls and buildings, from signs and wonders in the street. I seek the moment when action, expression, perspective, and light coalesce into an image that is dynamic and engaging and that invites the viewer into involvement, discovery, and delight.

I especially seek moments that comment on the changes and chances of life. I enjoy spontaneous interaction with my subjects while making images so that we collaborate in the creative moment.

To learn more about John, visit his website: jnwallphoto.com

Scott Geraci

Scott Geraci is a multi faceted artist who has worked in ceramics, steel, printmaking, and mixed media. In addition to being an artist, he is also an aspiring writer who is working on several children’s books.

Growing up on Long Island, Scott spent his summers watching his grandfather paint in his studio. During these visits, Scott would pass the time reading his grandfather’s collection of National Geographic magazines. The photography immediately drew him in and from then on, it became one of his first loves.

Scott finds himself drawn to things of uncommon and unexpected beauty. Whether it is an old broken down truck, an abandoned building, or even a chair, he strives to find beauty in what others may consider ordinary or even ugly. Regardless of the content, Scott’s goal is to present his subject matter from a point of view that we might not normally consider.

Scott lives in Tallahassee with his wife and their six children. He credits his children as a source of constant inspiration and for helping him to see the world from a different perspective.

To learn more about Scott please visit his website: scottgeraci.com

Gloria DeFilipps Brush

Gloria DeFilipps Brush lives in Duluth, Minnesota, where she is Professor of Photography in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Born in Chicago, she earned the M.F.A. degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Brush has received artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Polaroid Corporation, and the Bush and McKnight Foundations. Her work has been published in Leonardo, Zoom Inter-national, American Photographer, Darkroom Photography, Lightworks, Angeles, Harper's, and Viewcamera magazines, and in Naomi Rosenblum's book A History of Women Photographers.

Her photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cologne Photokina, SIGGRAPH, D-Art at the University of London, the BrasÌlia Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Print Club in Philadelphia, Clarence Kennedy Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Silver Image Gallery in Seattle, The Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among many others.

Artist Statement:
My evolving series Reconstituting uses an opened book as the recurring connotative premise and arena for interactions of language, objects, and pictures.

The book itself as object is multivalent, its meaning shifting with the expectations and framing of the reader. The relationship between fact and fiction may be altogether evident to one individual, unfathomable to another, or the very distinction seen as irrelevant or non-existent by still others.

The template of an open book, with pages coming before and after, courts habits of thought involving sequence or succession. Two facing pages propose a seemingly inevitable correlation, even if only to mark an end and a beginning.

Reconstituting fuses the innate power of objects with overheard, recorded or sometimes imagined dialogues. Photography’s own uncertain presence as observer is implicit.

To see more of Gloria's work visit her website.

Jerry Atnip

Jerry R. Atnip has been a professional photographer and designer for 30 years specializing in shooting for advertising, annual reports, celebrities, political figures, book, CD & video packaging, magazines, calendars and television.

He’s had the privilege of exploring the world shooting travel photography. His photographs have been published in 40 countries and his work has been honored with over 60 awards.

He has recently opened LightSpace Studio, a multi-media creative environment in a 100+ year old building.

To find out more about Jerry, visit his website jerryatnip.com

Selected Artist Announcement

Congratulations to all of our entrants to the Hands Off! International Digital Photo Juried Exhibition! You have all made excellent contributions to this exciting field of digital art and have made 621 Gallery history by participating in this new kind of competition. There were so many outstanding artists from around the globe that it was quite a task for juror Robert Fichter to select our winners from the nearly 300 images.

The selected artists are:
Best in Show - Jennifer Fairfax
First Place - Richard Desmarais
Second Place - Donna Callaghan
Third Place - Bryan Ghiloni
Honorable Mention - Beatrice Geller
Honorable Mention - James McClean

Selected Artists
Jeffrey Abt
Jerry Atnip
Peter Chamberlain
Janae Corrado
Gloria DeFilipps Brush
Colleen Ellis
Stephanie Fysh
Scott Geraci
Karen Joslin
John Math
Lynette Miller
Anna Norton
David Olsen
Steven Rubin
Jamie Runnells
Beate Sass
Mark Surloff
Dean K. Terasaki
Pauline Thomas
James Wendell
John Wall
Elizabeth Williams
Thomas Wolf
Lindsey Wollard

Examples of work by the winners will be posted this month to our website in the Hands Off! area. All winners should be on the lookout for another e-mail from this address discussing arrangements for sending files and exhibiting their work.

This is a groundbreaking event for 621 Gallery and the Board of Directors is so impressed that this is now the 1st Annual Hands Off! We will continue to have this opportunity as well as others, including a call for art donations for our major fundraising event, in the future. We encourage you to visit the apply section of our website for more details throughout the year.

Many thanks to all for contributing to the success of Hands Off! and 621 Gallery.

All the best,
Ansley Simmons
VP of the Board of Directors
621 Gallery