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Wall Works: Harrison D. Walker
Plaza Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia
Harrison D. Walker’s Portals is a multi-component project exploring color, chemistry and psychological perception. Each Portal is made with the principle of the photogram, utilizing light and pressure, to create endless variations. Similar to a Rorschach Test, each print is a variation of a repeated circular form, which explores how the viewer perceives variations in texture, surface, color, image, and time.
Each sheet of paper is coated with an emulsion or mixture of varying composition, printed using photogram, monoprint and collograph techniques, drawn on, and/or physically altered to achieve each unique print. Using light sensitive Silver Nitrate as a catalyst, many of the 71 prints in this exhibition are designed to continue changing over time, revealing subtle shifts in color and tone. This extended exposure allows each print to respond to the environment’s light, temperature, and humidity, resulting in a unique long-term visual experience.
Harrison D. Walker (b. 1988) is an artist living and working near Boston, Massachusetts. His research is driven by interests in the intersections of The Printed Object, The Archive, Chemistry, Astronomy, and Chance; he employs the visual alchemy of printmaking, drawing, and photographic materials to create forms that visually reference the celestial, the post-apocalyptic, and the otherworldly. Walker received an MFA in Photography at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. His work can be found at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine; Candela Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and The Print Center in Philadelphia, PA.
Wall Works is a program at the Dodd Galleries which invites an artist to create a semester-long, site-specific wall installation in the Plaza Gallery.
Fade like a sigh
Glass Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia
When she was 18, Rana Young drove 450 miles from St. Louis, Missouri to Lincoln, Nebraska to meet her mother for what’d be the first time she can remember meeting her. In his twenties, Zora J Murff made a similar trip from Iowa to Chicago to see his father, who’d left when he was a child of four. This shared constellation of what-ifs and could-bes became the starting point for Fade Like A Sigh, Young and Murff’s ongoing collaborative project, which attempts to follow their absent parents’ footsteps as a means to reconcile that loss. In place of that absence, a tableau of what it means for a boy to need a father or a girl a mother formed.
Conversation often begins with a question much in the same way art-making does. Words possess the potential to better know one another; the visual possesses knowledge to understand constructs both abstract and concrete, past and present. Each endeavor is a call in search of a response, but the response from the visual becomes more obscure as what we see creates a gap between what we do know and what we think we know.
Together, Zora J Murff and Rana Young began mining their own family histories, exploring the void left by an absent parent. The images in Fade Like a Sigh reflects their dialogues of this shared experience. Using their personal small collections of family photographs and reinterpreting them through their own contemporary imagery, Murff and Young highlight the complicated relationship between photographic record and the fragmented and abstract nature of memory.
PHOTO-EMPHASIS
www.photo-emphasis.com (no longer active)
PHOTO–EMPHASIS is dedicated to showcasing contemporary photographic art by established and emerging artists. Through features and exhibitions, we highlight work and research by artists both inside and outside academic institutions, providing an opportunity to share insight into personal projects and professional practices.
Our mission is to cultivate a resource that promotes pluralism in photographic art, education, and community. We acknowledge how photography has incited, memorialized, and perpetuated patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies and practices. We are committed to collectively dismantling these violent ideologies.
PHOTO–EMPHASIS was founded in 2017 by Alec Kaus and Rana Young, both alumni of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
(In)visible
Prescott Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska
(In)visible was a group exhibition of contemporary photographic portraiture by artists Zora J Murff, Elle Olivia, Walker Pickering, Bryan Schutmaat, and Rana Young.
Since the birth of photography, its practitioners have fixed their lenses on other people (and themselves) in an attempt to capture the intricacies and complexities of the human condition. Working under the umbrella of photography, these artists each continue that tradition, employing the use of portraiture within their greater practices to critically examine intersecting themes of individuality and community.
Elle Olivia Andersen uses photography to explore the culture and identity of the people who live in the American South. In his work, Zora J Murff examines anonymity, voyeurism, introspection, and loss through interpersonal relationships. Walker Pickering’s series Esprit de Corps explores the music, dedication, and sense of camaraderie that unites members of marching bands. In his series Grays the Mountain Sends, Bryan Schutmaat combines portraits, landscapes, and still lifes that explore the lives of working people residing in small mountain towns and mining communities in the American West. Rana Young’s images parallel the trajectory of circumstances within relationships while exploring themes of intimacy, voyeurism, and transition.