in the making…

May 31 - July 27

Opening reception Friday, May 31, 5-8 pm

ARTIST TALKS + PRINT NIGHT OFFERINGS: FRIDAY, JUNE 21 AND FRIDAY, JULY, 19, 5-8PM

In the Making is a provocative exhibition that illustrates where the photographic medium is today.  There are sculptures, camera-less works, multimedia constructions, collaborative pieces and an installation. Our hope is that viewers will delight in the craftsmanship, the use of line/drawing throughout, and the variety of alternative processes.  The themes will be familiar: family, conservation, art for art’s sake and the intuitive exploration of photography.  To say this is an exciting exhibit would be to understate our enthusiasm about it.  Come and bring people with you who want to delve into and learn more about contemporary artists and works. - Denise Froehlich, Director of MMPA

JODI COLELLA
susan Newbold
COLE CASWELL
JONtY SALE
SARA STITES + JOAN FITZSIMMONS
KAREN OLSON
SAL TAYLOR KydD
DM WITMAN
SUSAN MURIE
CAROL EISENBERG
ASTRID REISCHWITZ

Jodi Colella

Balancing tradition and innovation I create sculptures with elaborate layers of stitch, pattern and meaning using materials from soft domestic to rigid ceramic. My recent work intertwines familial connections and the inheritance of objects, skills and ideas passed through generations. Grandmother’s quilts, wedding dresses, drapes, plaid shirts, furry remnants from toys, upholstery, threads from unfinished needlework, and family photos are manipulated with crochet, weaving, wrapping and embroidery. I’ve recently introduced clay commingling rigid forms with fibers to create vessels that don’t hold water but instead contain stories embodying domestic life as an inquiry and form of self-discovery.

The sculpture A Figment Of is a wrapped wire fabrication about family and tradition as if a product of mental invention, a fantastic notion, an imagined story. Suspended in air it references the body indicating a neural network or brain. There is a complicated nostalgia with layers of vintage photography, fiber manipulation and domestic objects arranged to limit visibility and control the level of exposure. The softness of the wound cotton reads as a gentle, warm, encompassing recollection that triggers the imagination and draws you in. Once close, the oddly cropped images positioned in disoriented proximities to each other become more apparent and suggest an unsettling narrative about relationships. The red center, a domestic heirloom, acts as the heart of this framework with tightly wound threads that bind the subjects together. Pom poms from bedroom curtains, lace doilies, woven details and stuffed pillows add an ephemeral poignancy. Structured improvisationally it is iterative, growing and growing without knowing where it’s going, much like life itself. An extension of this work is Josephine and Elda. Ceramic vessels stitched with autobiographical fibers as photographic portraits. Something is a little off. The holes are in mismatched places. They reveal some of the interior but not much. Josephine is my great grandmother, an immigrant seamstress whose martyrlike stature in the family represented all that was amiss for women in the mid 20th century. Elda is her daughter and, as I recall, a beloved and defiant character in her family dynamic. All three pieces are my attempt to stitch together what is out of my control. Memory is fleeting, we are products of who came before us and we inherit from previous generations. Traumas, celebrations, politics, and family behaviors are brought forward and captured into our physiologies and souls. J.C.

The Shelter in Place Series

Jodi Colella, Shelter in place 1-4, 2020, Embroidered inkjet print, 24 x 24 inches, $1,200

Astrid Reischwitz

My project “Spin Club Tapestry” explores cultural memory by embroidering photographs, inspired by the tradition of spin clubs in Northern Germany.

I grew up in a small farming village, a village that is bound to its history and that stands out through its traditions even today. Long ago, village women met regularly in "Spinneklümpe" (spin clubs) to spin wool, embroider, and stitch fabrics for their homes. I imagine their conversations as they worked, the beautiful stories that lifted their spirits, as well as the stories of sadness, sorrow, and loss. In modern times, village women continued to meet in this tradition, but shared stories over coffee and cake instead of needlework. These close-knit groups of women often stayed together through life.

In this series, my composite images take the form of tapestries, combining images of embroidered Spin Club fabrics with new and old photographs from the village. I connect the present and the past by re-creating and re-imagining pieces of the embroidery. Spin Club tablecloths, napkins and wall hangings, dating back to 1799, have been passed down from generation to generation. By following the stitches in these fabrics, I follow a path through the lives of my ancestors - their layout of a perfect pattern and the mistakes they made. Along the way, I add my own mistakes. The fabrics also reveal the passage of time, stained and distorted after sometimes decades of use. The patterns I have stitched myself into the paper are only abstractions of the original Spin Club designs, fragments of memory. After all, memory is fleeting, and changed forever in the act of recollection. Sometimes the stitching is incomplete, creating an invitation for future generations.

Every decision we make is influenced by our history, our environment, and the society we live in. The tapestry of my life belongs to me but is stitched through with the beauty and heartache of past generations. -A.R.

Karen Olson

Karen Olson is a lens-based artist working at the intersection of human emotion and the natural world. In her figurative and nature-inspired work, she uses concept-based projects to explore the human-nature connection and its role in fostering mental health and communication. Working in photography and paper sculpture, she employs the act of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing with both physical materials and digital files. Karen's process includes earth pigments, Japanese and Korean papers, and ancient art techniques. K.O.

Sal Taylor Kydd

This body of work entitled “Lives Long Past” brings together a series of assemblages that use transparencies in combination with text artifacts to create new narratives around personal memory. Beginning with found photographs of my own family, I was curious about the stories held in family albums from generations past, women I had never met but whose presence was still felt so vividly. From there I expanded to include other women, whose ghostly presences had such a powerful hold on my imagination. I rephotographed these faces, reframing them and then printing them on transparent film. Hovering above the vintage tin of their containers, they call to mind tintype photographs, reflecting and floating above the background. The text that is also a part of these assemblages, includes words from my own poems, sometimes a stanza in its entirety, sometimes a fragment, sometimes just the suggestion of a word or phrase. In each instance the words are reimagined, reprinted on silk, enclosed in handcrafted folios, or layered on the tin itself. Presented together with the images, and enclosed in the tin containers, new stories are suggested as the viewer considers the connection between the text and image intimated in the juxtaposition. STK

Carol Eisenberg

Jonty Sale

I, too, live in the company of trees, in the south-west of England. The way I work constanly changes, but these pictures were made close to home, in the conventional analogue manner, using a large format field camera, a negative, and printing in a darkroom (in Maine). It is my experience of the forest that I am left uncertain - of orientation, taxonomy and time; often overwhelmed by the multitude, its relations and apparent ceaselessness of activity. However, I enjoy this state of doubt and unknowing, and the excitement sets my imagination to play. The most opposite way of translating this emotion was by making multiple exposures, building a composite image on the negative, without knowledge of how it would come out. I prefer to understand the landscape as the point of departure, rather than the destination: these pictures, therefore, are not an imitation, but rather a parallel of reality, creating an ambiguous surface which tilts the relationship between firm ground and suggested form. An idea of the forest happening.  JS

SARA STITES + JOAN FITZSIMMONS

Collaborative works by Sara Stites and Joan Fitzsimmons, JS 1-7, 2024, Ink and gouache on inkjet prints, 17 x 22 inches, $1000. each

COLLABORATION ESSAY

The synergy between individuals can be both magical and elusive. Such was the case with Joan and me, two longtime friends and admirers of each other’s artistic endeavors. We met as young women, mothers, teachers, with a shared ferocity toward making our work. Our collaboration was not born out of a formal agreement or plan, but rather from a natural flow of respect and admiration. We have an ease between us that allowed me to dive into the work without concern for judgment or reaction. I didn't worry about giving Joan's image 50% of the space, I knew she'd want me to react freely. Like any creative endeavor, our collaboration had its stumbling blocks. An initial attempt at this project left us uninspired. But timing has played a crucial role in our process. When I opened the box with Joan’s photos in the fall, they beckoned to me at just the right moment. Their size made them ideal for a project in my home studio, which provided a sanctuary when my larger studio felt too cold. What truly imbued our collaboration with depth and meaning was the history embedded within the imagery. Each photograph held memories, emotions, and stories of its own. Among them, a red goblet stood out – a symbol of friendship and connection, gifted me by Joan. Of course, I upended it. Joan and I are not just collaborators; we are fellow travelers on a journey through the ever-expanding landscape of art. Our shared history traces back to the era of abstract expressionism, a  movement that defined the cultural milieu into which we were born. As we grew and matured as artists, we witnessed shifts in the artworld. From the avant-garde pop of Andy Warhol to the boundary pushing works of Rauschenberg, we saw the boundaries of art expand in ways previously unimagined. As collaborators, we find ourselves at the intersection of past and present, At the heart of our work lies a shared commitment to capturing the essence of the personal narrative – the moments, emotions, and memories that shape our lives in profound and often unseen ways. -S. S.

Cole Caswell

Before the Abyss series

These site responsive works question aspects of place in a temporal and physical manor. The objects used are collected along the seashore and from a summer of sampling sea life with a set of lobster traps. The resulting photographs are created by exposing expired BW photographic paper to UV light with objects and plants laying on the surface. The resulting print is very temporal and starts to fade instantly. This fleeting object is then scanned in a dynamic environment – the process ruins the original print and the resulting scan is then printed with archival inks on a rag photographic paper

I am caught by the sense of chance and discovery that these photographic engagements produce. Each work is a kind of slide – a slice of the underwater world. My interest in these pieces centers on the surreal way we view and engage with the natural world – how versions of fact and fantasy are slipping together as we seek to navigate the present. As our surroundings shift these photograms poke and question at how we view and engage with the environment. The photographic experiments allow chance and the natural world to assert themselves in a visual way within the print. C.C.

Cole Caswell’s Chasing Shadows Book

Susan Newbold

Newbold’s work is often a journey in organic line and color. This line confronts the rooted and the displaced, the spiritual and the material. Drawing, painting, photography, bookmaking and printmaking are the vocabulary used to describe this artistic journey. Color and black and white are equally interesting to the artist and often there is a combination of both.

DM Witman

Etudes. I have used this work as a way to examine the significant transitions that surround our existence– careers, relationships, seasonality, my creative work. This collection of images marks an exploration and study for new ideas, process, and materials – other ways to deal with my artistic concerns. These camera less works in silver gelatin are a transition to what was to what will be- meditations of a present moment. -DM Witman

Susan Murie

The natural world, found objects, architectural elements, vintage toys, dinnerware and decorative objects, light and shadow are subjects that interest me and function as allegory as I consider the ephemeral nature of beauty, relationships and being and the materiality of cyanotype. I meditate on the shadows in shades of blue, pushing exposures into a serene darkness, the beauty of the blue hour,the deep and captivating Prussian blue color. I work on paper, silk and linen and add color and detail with paint, ink, spray paint, pencil, marker, dry pigments, cold wax and collage elements. I have a large archive of images to choose from when I begin a new piece responding to that moment/time/day creating a unique work. - S. M.