Five Years of initiative
Low and behold it is our 5th anniversary! In celebration we asked artists featured at Aspect Gallery over the past 5 years to share a new work with us to develop this Anniversary Exhibit. This show features a slice of the wide range of remarkable talent that we’ve been so fortunate to feature here in our galleries. A huge thank you! Such a sweet birthday gift.
It’s hard to believe that it has been five years since Steven first contacted me with his idea for an on-line gallery celebrating contemporary photography in New England (and sometimes beyond!). I have learned that I should listen to Steven’s ideas, and he wasn’t wrong with this. There are a lot of online places to see images, particularly in our past virtual year, but Aspect stands apart for me. It’s a space where one can delve into a project or portfolio and get to the heart of the featured artist’s process. A series of works opens up endless narratives, an avenue of possibilities when one is tasked with distilling the images in writing. It has been an honor to write for Aspect Initiative, to highlight artists I have worked with and whose work I feel connected to, and to discover new artists who broaden my world. Professionally, the past five years have been filled with ups and downs, and there have been periods where this connection to contemporary photography has been a lifeline. I am grateful to the artists who have granted me access to their work, and to Steven for the opportunity. Happy Birthday Aspect Initiative! - Jessica Roscio, Director and Curator, Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University. Aspect Partner & Contributor
In my now seemingly long career in the art, either as a practicing artist or as someone who works in Museums and not for profit Art organizations I always had a desire to develop a platform of my own to share art and ideas. To bring art and ideas to people. I feel that sharing work is an important part of the creative process. From idea to creation to outward expression. That cycle of creativity is always something that I am aware of in my own practice. I have often enjoyed the intimate experience of viewing art in small galleries. I wanted to deliver that experience but that would require time and capitol. Thus developing a small casual online gallery was my way of re-creating that experience. Living the way we live now, in pandemic, it seems a bit ironic that my goal was to build a boutique gallery that functioned completely online. Now, on our anniversary, I say thanks to Jessica and our contributors and the artists who particpate now and in the future. And thanks to those of you who spend time with our galleries. Cheers!! - Steven J. Duede, Fine Art Photographer and mixed media artist, Aspect Founder
Suzanne Revy
A Murmer in the Trees
Since 2018, I have been experimenting with diptychs, triptychs and more in my work. I find that multiple-panel presentations create dialogs between space and form, and imply passages of time. As I wander in the footsteps of the transcendentalist writers in and around Concord, Massachusetts, I have discovered surprising patterns and details in overlapping frames that echo with history, literary myth and personal memory. As a portrait photographer, focusing my camera on the landscape has been an unexpected and fruitful turn. The visual threads in my pictures reflect on physical, psychological and spiritual meanings of familiar places. I wish to impart a tenor of solitude that conveys a reverence for the fragile and enduring ecosystems that surround us, and draw parallels between the cycles of nature and human life.
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JP Terlizzi
A Cascade of Orange is part of an ongoing series which looks at our relationship with food, and how food is used as a vehicle to link perceptions and memory. The photograph focuses on the richness of objects using the rhythm of form, light, shadow and color to heighten the senses and indulgence.
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Astrid Reischwitz
Glowing
Series: Spin Club Tapestry
My current work “Spin Club Tapestry” incorporates embroidery and examines personal and collective memory influenced by my upbringing in Germany. By following the stitches in original fabric from my village, I follow a path through the lives of my ancestors, their layout of a perfect pattern and the mistakes they made. I connect the present and the past by re-imagining and re-creating pieces of the embroidery. The patterns I have stitched into the paper are only abstractions of the original designs, fragments of memory
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Yorgos Efthymiadis
"There Is a Place I Want to Take You"
I had an unsettling feeling when I returned, for the very first time after many years abroad, to the place of my origin. Even though I was surrounded by loved ones, friends and family who were ecstatic to see me, there was a sense of non-belonging. After a couple of days of catching up and hanging out, they returned to their routines. I stopped being their center of attention and became a stranger in a foreign land. It was harsh to come home, to a place which I banished in the past, only to realize that I have been banished in return.
Time leaves its mark, transforms places, and alters people. Even the smallest detail can make a huge difference to the way things were. After moving away, I had to rediscover what I have left behind. Using my memories as a starting point, I walked down the road that led to my high school, I lay on the sand at the beach, close to the house where I grew up, I nodded to a familiar face I couldn’t quite place and yet they smiled back.
All these round-trip tickets to the past, to a place that I once used to belong, reminded me one of Henry Miller’s quotes that always resonated with me: “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
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Emily Belz
Year One
My family moved to the country in 2019, and our home and the land it sits on has for generations belonged to the same family. Two of the brothers are now our neighbors. Parents, children, and grandchildren have gotten married on this land—the space feels sacred—and full of stories that while not my own, now rest in the space where my family stories are being made. I explore this co-mingling in both single and multi-panel images, working through the idea of inheriting or caretaking someone else’s history. How do you make a space your own, while respecting the echoes of all the voices that have past?
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Elizabeth Ellenwood
Fading Reefs
Image Title: Fading Reefs 1 Medium: Anthotype print made with beets
I’ve always had a profound reverence for the ocean, my work combines that with research-driven photography to engage curiosity and provoke environmental awareness. Our ocean’s coral reefs are rapidly turning into anemic wastelands due to global warming. Fading Reefs aims to visually communicate coral bleaching through the photographic process of anthotype printing, which uses the light sensitivity of plants to create a photograph. The print develops as the sunlight destroys the pigment in the exposed areas of the plant emulsion, bleaching the print. Unable to be fixed, the prints will fade over time. The anthotype process is a perfect way to tell the reefs’ stories, the bleaching pigment in the prints references the devastating loss of pigment rich algae that not only give corals their colors, but most importantly keep them alive. The anthotype prints in Fading Reefs are delicate, time sensitive, and beautiful – just like our ocean’s coral reefs.
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Michael Joseph
In August of 1960, Norman Mailer drove from his summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts to the summer home of Senator John Kennedy in Hyannis. Jacqueline Kennedy asked Mailer what Provincetown was like. “It’s the Wild West of the East,” he replied. Mailer also described Provincetown as the last democratic town in America where everyone was absolutely equal. “The Wild West of the East” is a street portrait series that examines the people of Provincetown and their stories, all taken in real time in public.
From an empty space where the Pilgrims first landed, to a Portuguese fishing village, to an artist’s colony and now a LGBTQ+ community Provincetown has always been a transformative space. This tradition of acceptance lies deep. To many, it is a found Neverland where the concept of “play” is encouraged, and the confines of society are stripped away. This sense of freedom is palpable. It is creative, sexual and exploratory. As one states, “I’ve painted my face 100 different ways walking into town and I’ve finally found a place where freaks like me are supposed to be.”
Still famous for its people-watching, Commercial Street serves as a thoroughfare where drag queens bark, parades crawl, leather men strut, and creatively dressed (or barely dressed at all) are in transit. Historically, among those might be writers, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Mailer himself or artists such Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. As a newcomer states “it is a site of connecting to a greater queer history – learning about the wonderful traditions and rituals a community built before me. It’s about a place of exploration of identity, making memories with good friends, and contributing to a place that has allowed me to be more fully alive.”
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Margaret Mitchell
In This Place (2016-17)
‘Steven’
Steven went for a walk, said he knew a nice place, just up the road. We walked then stopped in an area of open land, where his mum’s flat had been, before it was demolished and before she died. Steven had lived there with his mum. 'Nothing left here' he said.
This portrait of Steven comes from a larger body of work in a story of love and loss with social inequality at its heart. The work reflects on the paths our lives take us on and whether our choices are predetermined by whether we are born into disadvantage or privilege. A personal project as it is the photographer’s extended family, but also highly political, asking questions about how society operates, about social environment, opportunities available and inequality experienced.
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Susan Lapides
Crustaceans -There is a tension to holding any live animal, and lobster’s legs keep moving and sometimes their tails flap unexpectantly. The girls stand their ground with strength and handle the lobsters with determination: some cradle, some squirm, some raise it aloft triumphantly. The girls are standing on the cusp of young womanhood, raising questions, about their future identity - who will they become? Ancient and venerable, the lobster was determined eons ago; it remains unchanged as the girls evolve into women.The photographs are set on the Bay of Fundy among Eastern Canada’s rapidly changing fishing towns. Where once fishermen sold their catches across town, today they ship their lobsters halfway across the world; the town now tries to balance skyrocketing global demand against the increasing threats of ecological change and overfishing.
Many of these girls grow up in this context. The pose in these portraits – a girl holding a lobster – also recalls the recent trend of “big catch” images on social media and dating apps of the digital age, in which men brandish their trophies. As the series builds and layers over multiple years, the portraits reveal the intimate process of growing up: learning to cope with strange, spiky, unpredictable situations, discovering how to hold on to the things that matter, and finding a voice.
The juxtaposition of a young girl and a prehistoric animal is humorous, enigmatic and mythical – beauty meets the beast, but on her own terms. Watching my daughters holding live lobsters, I asked if I might make a portrait of them. That was in 2006. It is now an annual event. In 2015, now being empty nesters, I invited girls from the community to pose for me. Their response to this novel experience tells you about their personality, and how they approach the unexpected and handle new experiences and fears. Viewing the portraits over years, they become metaphors of girls growing up, and examines time, identity and femininity.
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![Amy Giese#1. 042518.20562115.37P.02134 (First-floor: Rolled, layered, turned, collapsed), 2018, unique silver gelatin skiagram, 57” h x 127.5” w [three panels]Project: Concealed at first at last I appearski-a-gram n. [Gk skia shadow + -gram from Gk …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e7cd7ed81fb782afe0da6f6/1612194155046-5BKLJ2XENEPXNH3L5LSA/01_ATGiese.jpg)
Amy Giese
#1. 042518.20562115.37P.02134 (First-floor: Rolled, layered, turned, collapsed), 2018, unique silver gelatin skiagram, 57” h x 127.5” w [three panels]
Project: Concealed at first at last I appear
ski-a-gram n. [Gk skia shadow + -gram from Gk –gramma, from comb. form of gramma something written or drawn]
Exploiting the indexical nature that is inherent to photography, I am presenting the viewer with a collapsed moment of reality, a trace in two dimensions of something that once was a full corporeal experience. The shadow left on the paper is an abstraction of a moment, a translation of it. The large-scale, unique, silver gelatin skiagrams that I make are a direct recording of the shadow patterns in a room at night. No camera. No lens. No aperture. The referents that ground us in our own visual world are removed, and you are left with indistinct yet indexical images, actual visual abstractions of a space. The aural projections are an additional abstraction of the original experience and also a translation of the image itself via the constructed space of digital software. Shifting grains of silver to pixels then to MIDI notes to reinterpret that original impression. The play between the projected sound with its linear progression of time with its physical presence in space and the implied time inherent in the flat representation of the skiagram sets up a moment that can challenge our experience of both media and their relationship to one another and to reality. And it is in the translation, both visually and aurally, that I hope to create a parallel space that a viewer can walk into, making them question what they see and how we perceive our surroundings.
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Cate Wnek
All Waves are Water
My practice with photography has given me the resilience needed for this highly uncertain time of global pandemic. The creative process is a visual, experiential escape. For me, it is a lot like taking a dive into the cold lake we visit each summer. It begins with a chilling dark plunge into my doubts and fears. There I am suspended indefinitely, as but a fragment of myself, dutifully living. Numbed, I am fallow. Then, only when I am acclimated with the giving nature of doubt and fear, can I poke through the barrier coming alive to see beauty anew. Enthralled, with the camera as my prism, I reveal the darkness in technicolor. Repeating, it is an undulating triangulation of fear— wonder— magic. Doubt, curiosity, and beauty oscillate like phases of waves. Deep black, swirling color, highlights in white. This is an ongoing call to teach myself, as well as my children, to see things differently — beyond the hurt, beyond the not knowing. It is the warm glow to offset the cold depths of this aching time.
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Alyssa Minahan
Have I Told You? is a visual love letter to my sons. In HITY?, I utilize a 1916 Kodak box camera to create pictorial black and white photographs. This mode of image-making, with its lack of exposure and focus options, allows me to create images that describe the ephemeral, awe-inspiring and devastating beauty of our shared lived experiences. Interspersed with these photographs are lumen photograms and chemigrams. With their constantly shifting hue and saturation, each lumen abstraction is a meditation on the durational period of time in which it was created. The presentation of varied images - fixed and unfixed, abstract and representational, color and monochrome - reflects the ways in which the photographic medium is able to depict the dynamic and complex relationships and experiences that define and give meaning to our lives.
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Mary Kocol
Title: The Photographer's Garden on July 1, 2018
Statement: My Botanica series is a contemplative examination of the garden as a timeless place to dwell, refresh, and reflect upon the profound beauty of the plants that surround us. This is a camera-less image made with live plants from my garden and a film scanner.
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Bill Franson
“Waldingfield”. 4x5 inch cyanotype print from the project Landscape in Blue.
Appleton Farms, one of the oldest continuously operating farms in the US, straddles the border between Ipswich and Hamilton MA and is a landscape I would wander through the woods to from my suburban childhood home. In January 2018 I returned to the farm with a large format camera to capture its arboreal landscape. That one visit was repeated weekly and by April had become a project I was to continue until the last days of that year. Along the way I decided to print in cyanotype and the title of the body of work “Landscape in Blue” arrived unbidden shortly after. In 2019 the Ipswich Museum exhibited "Landscape in Blue” in their Appleton Gallery. The image “Waldingfield” was taken in May 2018, adjacent to the farm's Waldingfield Road entrance.
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Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas.
Dineke Versluis
Swell
It is energy, not water that travels with the waves.
I often go to the beach. For a quick swim, to walk along the shore or to see the horizon and get lost in the vastness of sky and water. I feel happy that the world is bigger than I can perceive. But also inspired by a connectedness, as swells are often created by storms thousands of nautical miles away from the beach where they break.
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Gail Samuelson
Unraveling
My family made dresses in New York’s garment district, and as a young woman, I loved examining the sample dresses, trousseau nightgowns, and showy veiled hats worn by my mother and aunt. In Unraveling, I celebrate the women in my life, the makers and wearers of these clothes. Turning each garment inside out and gently prying seams apart, I photograph even stitches and the pattern pieces of construction. The reinforced hems, loosening threads, and stained fabric are remnants of embedded history. Outlasting their wearers, these garments function now as tangible links to familial passions, losses, and past dreams. As my family grows, I expand the scope to include clothing made by my daughter, thus pulling the thread forward into the next generation of dressmakers.
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Lindsey Beal
Feed
Above is a still from ‘Feed’. View the film here https://vimeo.com/488672494
The “Feed” films investigate the various ways parents fed their infants throughout time & cultures. While many cultures solely chest feed until a child is two or three, others supplement(ed) or replace(d) it with formula. Historically, infants were fed home-made pap, with milk and grain, or once weened, fed with their region’s domesticated mammal’s milk, such as goat, cow, water buffalo, etc., or eventually condensed or powdered milk. With the rise of Industrialization and scientific developments, commercially made formula use rose, with varying health results for the infants. Since then, the “breast is best” vs formula feeding debate rages on, as parents try to feed their children as they have done throughout time.
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This project would not be possible without the generous help from RISD’s Nature
Marky Kauffman
Dressings
Dressings is a series of digitally enhanced chemigrams that have evolved in response to the churning climate of misogyny, bigotry, and racism that is once again at the forefront of American culture today. The hands-on activity of creating these dress-like images soothed me – not unlike a dressing soothes a wound. In the 1970’s, women all over the world participated in Take Back the Night protests with the mission to end violence against women. In 2021, I am “taking back” the dress, which has often been used in service to female objectification. But I am reclaiming it! Metaphorically, I see the Dressings project as a healing force. The images are meant to represent the best of womenkind, humankind, and hope for a better more inclusive future for all.
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Claudia Ruiz Gustafson
Maria Magdalena from the series SHE
The inspiration for the series SHE comes from the poem Thunder, Perfect Mind. It’s an ancient poem, a monologue built on stanzas and spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power. Thunder, Perfect Mind is one of many early Christian and gnostic texts discovered in 1945 by Arab brothers near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. This poem may have been written in Egypt during the First century, probably by somebody who knew the traditions of Isis and the divine Sophia. When I first became aware of Thunder, Perfect Mind, I was immediately intrigued by the power of the text and the mystery of its paradoxes. I knew that I wanted to make a visual response to those stanzas.
Excerpt from a review by Leah Hamilton French in artscope in 2019: “… a portrait of a woman in a pleated toga, holding a framed image up to hide her head and face. The image is “The Penitent Magdalen”, ca 1640, an oil painting by French painter Georges de La Tour. In the painting, the seated Mary Magdalen looks away from the viewer, back over her left shoulder. The subject of her gaze is a candle, its flame reflected in the glass of an ornate mirror – a frame within a frame within a frame conceit that draws the viewer in. Her hands, fingers clasped loosely as though in a prayer, rest on the skull in her lap. On the left of Ruiz’s photograph, the words “I am honored and praised, and scornfully despised” hover over a grainy background reminiscent of old parchment. Both text and imagery form a powerful reference to the virgin-whore dichotomy,…”
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Jean Schnell
I have been photographing in old buildings almost exclusively over the past several years. Despite the emptiness and deterioration, the buildings seem full to me. I feel the spirit of people who inhabited, worshipped, played, worked and loved in the buildings. Whether found or intentionally added, objects in the buildings act as portals for my imagination, memories and feelings. The space comes alive in new and different ways, and I feel the yin and yang of absent and present, empty and full, tangible and intangible. The idea for a series of photographs about memories began when I downsized out of the home where I raised my children. While cleaning out closets, rooms, and hidden spaces in the house, I found things that triggered surprisingly strong and vivid memories. I became aware that as I start the aging process, the importance of memories will increase as time runs out and physical capacity diminishes.
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Scott Alberg
For the past few months I have been photographing around an abandoned office building near my home. The structure is very interesting, formed of two separate buildings connected by an elevated walkway over a small parking lot. The architecture features the immediately recognizable branding of its former tenant, the Pizzeria Uno’s Corporation. Red awnings, red brick, and period lamps adorn the exterior, with abrupt shifts in places to a more ubiquitous, and anonymous, office facade.
While shooting here I’ll sometimes think about the work that was done within those walls. What is left behind when a group of workers leave one office building for another? Can their depleted, imperceptive energy still give shape and frame new unrealized ideas and potentials? Inexplicit ideas and undertones permeate the site, pointing simultaneously towards the prosaic and the unanticipated. I hope to continue taking photographs here.
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Remi Thornton
While photographing something high up on a hill in Iceland, the light from this greenhouse stood out from a few miles away. It was hard to tell what was causing the light at the time, but given my interests, it seemed worth exploring. When I arrived, it was like heaven.
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Sean Sullivan
This project exams societies encroachment on nature. The Millers River in Middlesex County that once served as the boundary water between Charlestown and Cambridge has largely disappeared due to landfill and made land. Surrounded by industry, highways and railways, all that remains is a small estuary that empties into the Charles River. It's main purpose now is to provide drainage for residential and commercial property.
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Greg Jundanian
From the project, In Their Footsteps… An Identity Fractured by Genocide
A shrouded object hangs just left of a dilapidated center stage. The white cotton with a tasseled fringe fabric mysteriously floats, like a specter, watching over the coming and goings of the audience that once was. Behind the ghostly mass, slabs of faux aged stone plastered on top of plywood joinery lean haphazardly - the structures of the crumbled city that never was- trying to be one thing great while sadly becoming something else entirely. The velvet theater seats glow blood red. It is a reminder of the people who once were here, alive, in this space. An absent audience, a crumbled city, and a mystery that is too big, too tall, too far away to reach or understand.
Gregory Jundanian made this image in pursuit of truth and answers within his own familial history - a history that was and remains fractured by the atrocities committed during the Armenian genocide. He asks, how does one photograph that which is not there? Perhaps photographing the unavoidable marks of time is the most effective approach. Photographs evoke memory, and when an image creates more questions than answers, we are left with a feeling of loss and absence that matches the moment it was made in reference to. - Writing by Emily Sheffer
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Liz Albert
In this project, I’m Afraid Our Time Is Up, my collaborator Shane VanOosterhout and I are combining anonymous Polaroid snapshots with psychological phrases-inner thoughts we imagine each subject may be thinking and feeling. We source narrative excerpts from our personal journals and recent dialogues with each other. We then write, and appropriate, poignant and humorous phrases which touch on universal truth of the human condition.
This image, a young woman smiling and reclining on a sofa, was the first Polaroid, we acquired. We wonder about this person: What’s her relationship to the photographer? Why is she in a good state of mind? Is someone about to smoke a cigarette? We invite the viewer to explore their own empathic reactions and emotional connections to the photographs and text.
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