Bea Geller

Artist Statement
Domestic Hearts 2 represents a small facet of my photographic work. The piece is from an exhibit entitled Color and Form. What I enjoy as an artist is the integrative aspect of the arts where work is not in a separate category of a particular discipline.I have become interested in actual shapes to convey photographic content. I find I am moving away from the convention of singular photographic image, and the rectangular frame. This image is representative of my intial experiments in the integration of photographc, sculptural and painterly forms.Content is explored in both symbolic juxtaposition of imagery within the forms as well as in the more traditional narrative.

Steven Rubin

Artist Statement
The modern zoo, on first glance, appears as a harmonious locale of mutual benefit for animals and humans alike. Zoo animals are clearly provided for – their natural predators no longer a concern, their daily imperative to find food always satisfied, their species’ survival protected in new naturalistic displays that replace the egregiously cruel cages of yesteryear. Humans get enormous benefit as well – families are entertained, children see the prototypes for their stuffed animals, researchers advance their knowledge and hosting cities get to boost their civic pride and revenue. Seems like a win-win until you recall just who designed the place and who holds the keys. As much as zoos are about admiring and preserving the animal kingdom they are also less overtly about keeping it under human dominion.

This body of work examines the zoo as a complex meeting ground where animal needs and the human desire for spectacle and control meet, mingle and conflict. Through a series of photographs of human and animal interaction at the San Diego Zoo, this visual essay (from which this single image is selected) playfully explores larger issues and conflicting attitudes toward nature and its man-made destruction and simultaneous reconstruction in the zoo. In essence, the work constitutes a visual form of anthrozoology – the study of human and animal relations – in a meeting place where conflict runs wild.

Bio
Steven Rubin has photographed on assignment in Iraq, Rwanda, Kosovo, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile and Cuba, and throughout the United States. His images have been published in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, and internationally in The London Independent Magazine, Stern, GEO, Focus and L’Express, among numerous other venues. His pictures have also appeared in the publications of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Ford Foundation, the Soros Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is the recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship. He was a Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute – New York, and a Community Fellow with the Open Society Institute – Baltimore, where he founded and directed the innovative program Healing Images, which provides digital cameras, instruction and therapy to survivors of torture.

A graduate of Reed College, he is presently finishing his MFA at the University of California, San Diego. He will be an Assistant Professor of Photography at Penn State University beginning in January 2008.

Timothy Bryan Ghiloni

Subway Sleepers
Subway Sleepers began as other groups of images have in the past; with simple observation. I would ride the train to and from wherever it was I had to go, and I watched the others that did so as well. I became fascinated with those who allowed themselves to fall asleep in the subway system. The act of sleeping itself is an intimately peaceful act being committed against an insecure and turbulent backdrop. It is an act of comfort, an act of surrender, and an act of trust. It is an act most commonly practiced behind locked doors. I began to take a visual note of their similarities and their difference. I found that a person’s expression or posture could tell me the story of their day and perhaps even their life. Some of the photographs are highly intimate portraits citing expression and vibration, others are contextual in nature and give the viewer details of the venue. I fell into a love affair with the Subway Sleepers and photographed them extensively over the next two years. Indeed, I was fixated on this act, preformed for all to see on the subway’s stage and soon I had an ensemble of images that covered a greater cross section of the quiescently commuting New Yorker. Overall concepts began to formulate such as unity and equality. The act of sleep symbolizing a common thread we all share, linking us all as one body of people. Yet, I knew that there was a greater personal meaning to this exploration. I took a step back from the shooting process to study the images and seek out feedback. In time I came to realize that by photographing the somnolent, I am essentially comparing the myself to the sleeper and ultimately coming to identify and relate to my recessed subjects. The images become less about who they are, and more about who we are. We tour here and there, day to day and pay check to pay check, in order to maintain some meager level of existence in this city that ironically never sleeps. We are all New Yorkers in our sleep. We are all Americans in our sleep. We are all people, in our sleep. We toil and travel, taking what refuge we can during our commute through life. The activity of sleeping on the subway becomes synonymous with struggle. The working poor, making use of an unfit environment to gain a moments rest. Through these images, I am dealing with my own issues of financial security, how society defines success, and the role that money plays in that definition. I am coming to terms with my economic status and place in life. Suffice to say that I am afraid of never reaching that monetized comfort zone, afraid of never waking up from this pecuniary repose, afraid of never getting off of the subway.


Timothy Bryan Ghiloni was born and raised in Newark, Ohio, just outside of Columbus. He graduated from Lakewood High School in 1994, showing great artistic promise and ambition. After high school, Bryan began college at Columbus State where he studied Graphic Communications for a year and a half. Discouraged by the lack of creativity involved in this field of study, he transferred schools. In 1998 he began attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where he found his calling as a photographer. Bryan graduated in 2002 with dual B.F.A.s in Photography and Graphic Design, achieving honors in each. After graduation he moved to New York City where he freelanced out of his own studio and worked with some of the most influential photographers in the medium such as Joyce Tenneson and Arnold Newman.

Over the course of Bryan's young career as an artist, he has shown in over 30 exhibitions including 6 solo shows and 3 New York City exhibitions. Timothy Bryan Ghiloni is also heavily involved with his artist collective, the Stillmoreroots Group. Recently the group has relocated to Swainsboro, Georgia where they are working with numerous community and arts organizations in order to build community and economy through art-related programming. The most recent derivative of this initiative is Gallery RFD, a non-profit art gallery that Bryan codirects with fellow Stillmoreroots member Anthony Faris. Bryan and Anthony will also be exhibiting together in a joint show in October at Augusta State University

Lindsey Wollard

BIO
Lindsey Wollard has been interested in art all her life. As a child, she sacrificed Saturday morning cartoons for art lessons at the local Art League. She excelled in art classes all through her school years and when it came to choosing a major in college, the decision was not a hard one. After completing her first year of college at Florida State University, she moved back to her hometown of Ft. Myers, FL and attended the nearby Florida Gulf Coast University where she graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelors Degree in Art in 2005. FGCU was also host to many of her first exhibitions, including her first solo exhibition. She has also exhibited at Space 39 and the Arts for ACT Gallery both located in Ft. Myers, FL, and the Art League of Bonita Springs in Bonita Springs, FL where she was awarded 3rd Place. Wollard also earned the Art House Foundation Award in 2004 and a credited photo of her work was featured in Southwest Florida Happenings Magazine in July of 2007. She currently lives in Ft. Myers, FL, where she works at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I think some of the most interesting photographs are of fleeting moments, like this one. They can not be staged or even recreated. These kinds of occurrences happen all the time, but it is only when a camera is present that there is ever any documentation of the event. It’s all about the lucky circumstance of being at the right place at the right time, camera in hand.

James Wendell

James Wendell was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. He became interested in photography at the age of 12 after finding his dad’s Polaroid Landcamera stuffed in the back of a closet. He graduated the New England School of Photography at 20 in 1998 and won 1^st place in an A.S.M.P. competition in 1999. He has shown work in Massachusetts, Florida and New York City. His work was recently published in JPG Magazine. He enjoys his own brand of wit and wisdom and is working on finding the 13^th use of dragons blood. He currently works at Magnum Photos and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
www.jameswendell.com

David Teng Olsen

Artist Statement
My name is David Teng Olsen and I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wellesley College. I am originally from Seattle, WA. I received my Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of Washington and my MFA from University of Wisconsin – Madison. Before I entered graduate school I had the fortunate experience of studying in Rome and Taipei. As an undergraduate I spent over 5 years studying Bioengineering, which has a large influence on my artwork. During my time as a Bioengineer I illustrated and designed a Bioengineering text book that is now the required text for Bioengineering classes at Stanford, Berkley and UC Davis to include a few.

The world of science intrigued me very much but I was disenchanted by the compartmentalization of the field and how little there was in the way of freedom to choose the ideas that I wanted to explore. Instead, most of the research went toward developments dictated by modern culture such as obesity, and sexual prowess; subjects I was not necessarily excited to research. I came to the conclusion that Art would be a better venue to thoroughly explore the science that intrigued me and bring it into a different light. As a scientific illustrator I was fascinated with the idea that the concepts I was illustrating had never been described before as visual objects. Rather, they only existed conceptually as mathematical formulas and theory. Because of the unique position I was in, the ability to understand the concepts being conveyed and interpreting them as visual objects, I found a vast fountain of inspiration and knowledge from which I could create both paintings and sculptures. From simple two and three dimensional forms, using a contemporary vernacular, I had the ability to describe these complex theories, believed by many to be the mechanisms of life, into easily to distinguished characters and forms that create environments which anyone can explore and see clearly; a diagram that describes many functions of the internal microscopic world that exist in every complex living creature.

My goal is to continue to explore these relationships between science and art. I imagine creating many more of these visual environments that investigate and evolve from scientific and visual research. From these installations, I want a dialogue to occur between the fields of Science and Art, where today there is little to none. Both fields could only benefit from one another.

Visit David’s website www.siamesebirds.com

Peter Chamberlain

Statement
My initial experiments with analog and digital imaging explored the possibilities of using unlikely combines of capture and modulation devices. I considered any prints that evolved as little more than documentation of the processes employed. It wasn’t until I tried to prove to a friend and colleague who was a traditional printmaker that digital prints could also have the rich textural quality of intaglio or litho that I began to take the “print” seriously.

On the other hand, the piece shown here is admittedly plain old fun. I have a younger girlfriend and a friend with a younger wife told me I should shave my ear hairs because “younger woman don’t like that”. My reaction was to let the hairs grow and photograph and scan my ears in ways way that accentuated the hairs as well as the grey hairs on my head. Currently I am doing a series on my bald spot. Aging…fashion…taboos…and satire.

Bio
Peter Chamberlain received an MFA in metals from SUNY New Paltz, an MA in sound-sculpture from SUNY Albany, and a Post Graduate Certificate in installation and performance from the Vancouver College of Art (now ECIAD) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He has been teaching some form of electronic arts full time since 1977. He taught sculpture, electronic arts, and contemporary art history/criticism at Elmira College in NY for 15 years. In 1991 he moved to Oahu to design and implement Electronic Arts courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where he continues that quest.

He has exhibited or performed intermedia work throughout the continental US, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in Mexico City, in Essen and Munich, W.Germany, Melbourne, AUS, and in Hawai'i. He has lectured on this work in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, continental US, and Hawai'i.

Since 2001, while continuing his sculptural experiments, he has shifted his focus to working with Mokaki, a group of “rapidly aging activist poets, artists, and musicians” who record weekly and perform at special interest activist venues on Oahu. He maintains multiple roles as keyboardist, technical director for performances, recording engineer and keeper of the studio, and also designs and constructs sculptural instruments and amplification devices that serve as functional stage props for performances.

Recently he has also been exploring various modes of digital image manipulation and printing and participating in online exhibitions.

Site: peterchamberlain.net

Elizabeth Williams

I feel regrets nearly every night I close my eyes and before I feel doubts and all of the little circles the viewer sees stands for different depths of agnotism i tend to go through. I needed a way to convey this to my audience.With luck I hope I have.

I first picked up photography and digital imaging in 2002 and I'm still learning things I have never imagined possible.I am a woman of few words so the use of art is my medium of expression . Please feel free to view my journey as it goes along @ http://elizabeth.mosaicglobe.com/. I am starting up a new project which includes making prints of my work as well as working as a freelance artist. 25% of all proceeds will be donated to the Alzheimer's Foundation of America along with Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Colleen Ellis

Time | Place Series
In this ongoing series of photo grids, the intent is to visually explore temporal moments in time, place and space. Some grids depict an hour in time and space, others represent a day, while some occur over many days. They are about moving—traveling—it is the seeing for the first time that awakens the sense of being. By focusing on distant images in nature, one may begin to clarify, process, or reflect on what is close. They are, in ways, inspired by the work of photographer Atta Kim, the writings of philosopher’s Joseph Campbell and Martin Heidegger.

As an artist interested in both modernist and postmodernist discourse, these photo grids provide a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic, information-dominant culture. Having spent many years creating graphic visual identity for marketers, an acute sense of awareness to the affects of these visual messages has emerged. These photo grids provide an alternative time and place to the vastness and omnipotence of these visual messages, providing a vehicle to transcend what Fredric Jameson calls the “simulacra.”

Further the digital camera is used as an appendage to the body, illustrating a vantage point disconnected to the eye, shifting the viewer’s perspective. As I move through time and space the camera is pointed outward, away from the body, toward a particular landscape or skyscape, cap- turing its particular image of time and space. By disconnecting the camera from my eye, I am free to focus on the moment, on what I am seeing and experiencing. When working on the Time | Place Series, I am brought to a place of reflection, contemplation, and transcendence of the here and now.

To see more, visit Colleen’s website: colleenellis.us

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.