Abbey Hepner, Jessamyn Lovell, Delilah Montoya, Cara Romero, Kali Spitzer, and Laurie Tümer.
Six New Mexico Women Photographers making a strong statement about their lives and the issues influencing them.
September 15, 2017 through October 24th, 2017
D.I.Y P.I. CLINIC by JESSMEYN LOVELL @Warehouse 1-10
Saturday September 23, 2017 Noon to 3pm.
CARA ROMERO
In this series of oil paintings, Hill blends landscape and the figure utilizing a distinct, saturated color pallet which is carried through out her work. Another commonality in this seemingly eclectic body of work is Hill’s heartfelt connection to the Southwestern environment where she has lived for the past 25 years. Her concerns for the environment and women’s social issues are intertwined within the pieces.
Hill spent her youth and early adulthood living between Paris, France and Chicago, Illinois and later years in New York City. While in France, she had the opportunity of being mentored by the renowned Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell. This influence is apparent in her use of high key color. Hill says she “uses paint as a visual language to convey emotion rather than objects. “
She reflects on a quote by Andy Goldsworthy from A Collaboration with Nature to explain her unbridled approach in art making, “The one contradiction I won’t tolerate is having an art that binds me.”
JESSAMYN LOVELL
LAURIE TUMER
Abbey Hepner’s work questions our reliance on technology. Her Transuranic series provides a close-up look at the radioactive waste that is all around us. Hepner photographed each of the sites in the western US that ship radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, NM, documenting the locations and tracing the routes across our country and printing these scenes using a uranotype process. Their reddish-yellow hue, formed by the exposure of uranyl nitrate, evoke a haunting nostalgic sensation that is instantly negated by the reality reflected in the images. Hepner’s snow globes trap modern-day industrial landscapes in miniature and pose the question of what kinds of places evoke nostalgia today.
Abbey Hepner (b. 1983) is an artist and educator investigating the human relationship with landscape and technology. She received degrees in Art and Psychology from the University of Utah and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. Upon moving to New Mexico from Japan, where she did disaster relief work following the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown, Abbey set out to understand the impact of the nuclear industry on her immediate landscape. In the Transuranic series, she utilizes an archaic photographic process that uses uranium instead of silver, in which the uranyl nitrate is painted onto paper and exposed beneath a negative under a UV light.
Delilah Montoya’s series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidadwas born out of interest in the racial categorization depicted by the colonial “casta painting” genre that originated in Mexico, depicting family racial and class types. Like the colonial casta paintings, Delilah’s photographic constructions include a family portrait accompanied by racial identifying information. In her version, actual DNA genetic analysis is conducted and the results are depicted with laser etched panels illustrating a world map of each family’s migration history and with a sand-filled glass tube showing the family’s biogeography. A QR code embedded on the surface of the portrait accesses a unique webpage for each family depicted. The result is insights for both the subjects of the portraits and the viewers regarding the instability of identity and the ways we are inclined to construct our own histories.
Delilah Montoya (b. 1955) was born in Fort Worth, Texas and raised in the Midwest, but her longtime place of residence is New Mexico, the ancestral home of her mother’s family. Working her way through school as a medical photographer, she received her MFA in 1994 from the University of New Mexico. She currently is a professor of Photography and Digital Media at the University of Houston School of Art. As a photographic printmaker who has experimented with most print processes, Delilah consistently pushes the boundaries of what is technically possible and conceptually challenging. Her work explores the unusual relationships that result from negotiating different ways of viewing, conceptualizing, representing and consuming the worlds found in the Southwest from her perspective as a feminist Chicana artist born into a matriarchal family.
Catherine Cerf Hill
Composing Visions
Oil on Canvas
KALI SPITZER
JESSMEYN LOVELL’S work integrates photography, video, performance, and social surveillance as a vehicle to document her life experiences and the lived experiences of other people. Lovell says her work “traces my examinations of narrative to question where truth and fiction meet.
After having her identity stolen Lovell turned her camera to surveillance of the person who stole her identity. The result is an evolving body of work and exhibitions including her current solo exhibition at Central Features Contemporary in Albuquerque. In a time where identity theft, continuous surveillance and alternate facts flourish Lovells work has become increasingly relevant.
Lovell has taken her art practice one step further by actively pursuing her Private Investigators license in the state of New Mexico. Required to loge 6000 hours to obtain her license Lovell hosts D.I.Y.P.I. Clinics open to the public where she will give advice to “clients. In each session Lovell will hear the “client’s” story and talk them through some possible strategies for a Do It Your Self solution to the problem.
The Clinic will be hosted at Warehouse 1-10 Saturday September 23, 2017 from Noon to 3pm.
This event is sponsored by CHROMA a New Mexico Non-Profit and is free and open to the public.
Reservations are not required. For more information call 575-854-3253
Jessamyn Lovell uses photography as a tool of choice to pull apart personal life experiences, often questioning where truth and fiction meet in the process. Her use of empathy as an asset rather than a liability in approaching investigations is a critical thread that runs through all her work and is a focus in her most recent projects. Using her own stories, successes and failures, she deliberately makes herself vulnerable while simultaneously revealing strengths as she navigates difficult territories through the lens of research. All her work addresses critical social, political and social justices issues which affect us all in unique and personal ways.
Jessamyn Lovell (b. 1977) is a visual artist working with photography, video and surveillance tools to document her own life experiences, making connections between class and personal identity. Holding a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from California College of Arts, Lovell lives in Albuquerque where she is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Art Department at the University of New Mexico. Jessamyn’s work has been exhibited nationally and is the recipient of several awards. She has received international recognition for her work, Dear Erin Hart, in which she found, followed and photographed her identity thief. She is currently working towards getting her private investigator’s license as a conceptual art piece.
HISTORY / HER STORY
Composing Visions by Catherine Cerf Hill offers a glimpse into a versatile artist’s expression in painting. Hill has an unbridled approach to work and life. She moves fluidly between media sometimes creating sculpture, performance or film and at times incorporating subject matter that reflect the social and political climate.
DELILAH MONTOYA
GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTNING
Warehouse 1-10 is proud to present the film Grab a Hunk of Lightning, a film about the life of renowned documentary photographer Dorothea Lange through the eyes of her granddaughter, award winning cinematographer and film director Dyanna Taylor.
Explore, through her granddaughter’s eyes, the life story of Dorothea Lange, the photographer who captured the iconic image “Migrant Mother”. Never-seen-before photos, film footage, interviews, family memories, and journals reveal the artist who challenged America to know itself.
Lange’s enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II Japanese American Internment camps, and early environmentalism. Yet few know the story, struggles, and profound body of work of the woman behind the camera. Award winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, Lange’s granddaughter, directs and narrates this intimate documentary as it explores Lange’s life, probes the nature of her muses – two great men and the camera itself – and her uncompromising vision. Taylor, who learned to see the visual world at her grandmother’s feet, weaves Lange’s preparations for her career retrospective at New York’s MoMA into a universal story of a woman’s struggle to live a creative life.
Reception & Screening
Q & A with the film’s director Dyanna Taylor.
Saturday October 14, 2017
Promptly 5pm
Suggested donation $10.00
Seating is limited
Reservations requires. Call 575 854 3253
Contact: Catherine DeMaria
This film screening is sponsored by CHROMA a non-profit arts and educational outreach organization.
ABBEY HEPNER
CONTACT US FOR PRICING & ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
THE EXHIBITION
Curated by David Eichholtz of David Richard Gallery and Howard Rutkowski, this exhibition was created in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the New Mexico Committee of The National Museum of Women in The Arts and was accompanied by related events by the Committee emphasizing the power of photography as an art form.
The Curators undertook a wide search of women photographers from New Mexico before selecting six photographers to highlight. They include: Abbey Hepner, Jessamyn Lovell, Delilah Montoya, Cara Romero, Kali Spitzer, and Laurie Tümer.
The artists selected for the exhibition all have strong statements to make about their lives and the issues influencing them. The title of the exhibition, HISTORY / HER STORY, pays homage to the fact that each artist’s perspectives are shaped by life experiences, ethnicity and the surrounding environment.
Kali Spitzer challenges pre-conceived notions of race, gender and identity through her portraits. Her aim is to provide space for people to be seen, heard and represented in the way they want. In her series, An Exploration of Resilience, Spitzer photographed members of her community, both Indigenous and mixed heritage people. The goal was to convey each subject’s story, including their spirit and perseverance as well as the pain. Trust is an essential element of her work. Through the timeless lens of the tintype, and in close collaboration with her subjects, the relationship between the process of creation and the person being photographed is made manifest.
Kali Spitzer (b. 1987) is a Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, British Columbia) on her father’s side and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania on her mother’s side. She is from the Yukon and grew up on the West Coast of British Columbia, Canada. She earned a diploma in Professional Photography from the Western Academy and studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Community College. At the age of 20, Kali moved back north to spend time with her elders, and to learn more about her Kaska ancestry and culture, learning how to hunt, fish, trap, tan moose and caribou hides and bead. Kali focuses on cultural revitalization through her art, whether it is the medium of photography, ceramics, tanning hides or hunting; all of these practices she views as art and part of an exploration of self.
Laurie Tümer’s Glowing Evidence series illustrates the omnipresence of pesticides –chemicals developed during WWII to eradicate people (and still used in warfare) and later to eradicate insect pests. Her project began in 1998 after she experienced a pesticide poisoning at her home – a company that advertised “organic pest control” sprayed synthetic pesticides instead. This motivated her to create visualizations for what is invisible. Tümer found inspiration in the environmental scientist Richard Fenske who developed a safety training demonstration using fluorescent dyes and UV light to show farmworkers working with pesticides, pictures of their exposures despite the use of protective gear. Using Fenske’s technique, she simulates pesticides in our homes, gardens, and in our bodies, and provides updates to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In her animated lenticular photographs, where viewers experience the alternating seen and unseen, Tümer says, “Motion warns us of danger, so the medium is also the message!”
Laurie Tümer (b. 1951) was born in Los Angeles and has lived in New Mexico since 1988. She received her BA from the University of Arizona and MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Tümer has created eccentric bodies of work: self-portraits printed on stone, photo-essays about pesticides and oil drilling, projects that use animated lenticular photography, and cloud studies taken from her bed. She teaches Photography, Art Criticism, and Art History at Santa Fe Community College, and Writing at Northern New Mexico College in Española. photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe represents her work. Tümer’s books include Night Writer and CLOUDS. She is currently working on a publication about Glowing Evidence.
May 6 - June 10, 2017
Opening Reception Saturday May 6, 2017
5 to 7 pm
Cara Romero’s work reflects her diverse training in film, digital, fine art, journalism, editorial portraiture and commercial photography. Her powerful, large-scale photographs bring awareness to current events as well as the misrepresentation of Native Americans in popular culture, while underlining the importance of protecting Indigenous communities and preserving their traditions. Cara uses her photography to broaden perceptions and introduce ideas outside of the mainstream perception of indigenous art. Through her photography, Cara captures beautifully composed stories layered with symbolism that can evoke emotion from anyone of any background. It is always her intention to portray Native women in the context of the inherent Chemehuevi belief that women have an innate strength as all powerful, supernatural life givers who are equals in society.
Cara Romero (b. 1977) is a Santa Fe-based visual storyteller with a distinctive lens shaped by years of study, personal experience, collective history and a visceral Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory. She is the mother of two boys and the wife of the highly regarded contemporary Pueblo artist Diego Romero, and the daughter of a Chemehuevi father and a German-Irish mother. Cara studied Photography at both the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and Oklahoma State University and studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Houston. Her photography, a mélange of fine art and documentary style, is often whimsical and with a complex interplay of social commentary, adaptation and examination of modern culture with a distinctly modern Indigenous world view. It is multi-layered, meant to be experienced from a multi-verse of perspectives, and invites viewers to enter into its nuanced visual architecture with an open mind.