James McClean

The entity known as James McClean was incarnated upon this Earth in August of 1966, first son of a printer in North Jersey, USA. At an early age of development were his artistic glands stimulated, most impressively by the paintings of Salvador Dali as seen in books of his father’s library. After an unusually dark period of teenage angst the young artist took to the highway by thumb after high school to see what the world has to offer. The road system ends in Alaska, and there James camped the summer of ’85 along a stretch of beach, writing poems and selling watercolours and candles to tourists. The long strange trip later took James to New Mexico where he halted for ten years, enraptured by the high desert light and completing undergraduate studies in History of Photography and European Archaeology at the University of New Mexico. During this period James realised a dream of creating holograms and exhibited one of his works in a juried exhibition at the Holos Gallery in San Francisco in 1990, as well as showing photographs at several other juried shows at his university art gallery. James joined the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1988 to enable wider travels and had the great blessing to spend several summers in Europe wandering the landscape with his cameras between 1987 and 1997.

Studies of aerial photography and computer cartography led to a fascination with the discovery of archaeological sites by remote sensing methods. This fascination become a career move, bringing James to Tallahassee to complete a Masters degree in Underwater Archaeology at Florida State University. Aside from a year long contract as photographer for the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center to document museum collections, this was a long pause from photography. During this time James studied environmental archaeology in 1999 at Umeå University in Sweden and passed 2001 in Germany excavating Stone Age sites in the Baltic Sea. Subsequent employment as remote sensing data analyst for the Florida Geological Survey from 2002 to 2005 gave James a thorough grounding in digital imaging technology, and in late 2004 James acquired his first professional digital camera and the seeds of inspiration were once again sewn in his Mind. It was sometime during this period that James actualised the True Nature of Reality, ie that all Being is Light and his Soul was detached from his corporeal form and held in stasis in a piece of Nikkor glass, where it resides to this day, the better to interpret the world of real things around him in accordance with the Real World of Ideas within.

A year at Lively Technical Institute studying Commercial Photography provided James with the elements of an education which filled in the gaping holes left from his art school education, namely how to pay the bills. In February 2006 James was awarded several Addy Awards for excellence in Advertising Photography, taking Silver, Gold and Best in Show prizes in the student category at the local level, and a Gold award for the Southeast region allowing him to represent Tallahassee’s Lively Tech at the national level. It was also in early 2006 that James received the blessing of studio space in Tallahassee’s Rail Road Square artist community, where upon he commenced touring the world in search of stimulation for his artistic glands. A long anticipated two month sojourn to Egypt to photograph the Total Eclipse of the Sun was then followed by a long overdue return to Alaska, commencing with a good several months long wander followed by a magical winter spent photographing the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights. You can follow James’ travels at his web site, http://www.McCleanImageStudio.com where he sells his fine art prints. James’ travel and advertising stock photography is also represented at http://www.Alamy.com, search word “McClean”. Look forward to a wide selection of images from Egypt and Alaska this holiday shopping season. James plans to keep the Tallahassee studio open for portraiture during the winter holiday and late spring seasons (ie. November through New Year’s and May – late June) with the remainder of the year appeasing his hunger for travel photography. The next Total Solar Eclipse will be August 1^st, 2008 when James is planning a photo safari to Gansu Province China to witness this Cosmic Spectacle, e-mail for information to join this expedition: jamesmcclean@yahoo.com.

James’ work can best be described as a visual exploration of Humankind’s awkward Love/Hate relationship with Mother Nature. While some look to the beauty of the natural landscape James prefers a wider lens to bring into focus the telephone wires and parked cars that now define our modern landscape. Wilderness is scarcer and scarcer to find, urban blight grows like a cancer across the land and fresh air and clean water will soon no longer be just a luxury for the rich, but may not be available at any price with our current rates of conspicuous consumption. Photographs are for James mirrors reflecting inner light toward other beings, magic mirrors which hold Thoughts and Memories fast for future generations to understand the world of Ideas and Images that shaped this current generation in which we live.

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