Jocelyn Lee at Rose Gallery

Jocelyn Lee

Nowhere but Here

Rose Gallery

September 24, 2011 - November 19, 2011

“Photography is not about fact or truth; but it is about a casual relationship between light, subject, and receptive material. Light reflects off an object and accumulates on a sensitized surface, marking it so as to resemble that object. Things that we see as well as things that we do not see are held in relationship to one another, and the photograph—unlike a painting or drawing becomes a mysterious but irrefutable anchor to a real event in space and time. This does not mean that the photograph cannot lie or distort; it can do both. But hidden within that illusion is always an umbilical cord to an actual moment.”

—Jocelyn Lee, nowhere but here

Rose Gallery website

Artist's website

Rose Gallery

Bergamot Station Arts Center

2525 Michigan Ave

Santa Monica, California, 90404

Willard Traub at the Danforth Museum

Recovery 1, photograph

September 11, 2011 - November 6, 2011

Members Preview Reception: Saturday, September 17, 6pm - 8pm

Poetry Reading: Sunday, September 18, 1pm

Photographer Willard Traub will read poetry and prose poems he's written to illuminate photographs in Recovery.

Exhibition catalogs available, with a portion of sale proceeds to be donated to Be the Match Foundation, the national clearinghouse for bone marrow transplant donors and recipients.

Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 21, 12:30pm

About the Exhibit

Willard Traub: Recovery is an exhibition of unique photographs that impose the lens of human experience on the healing process, Traub’s strong, emotional images directly connect us to an artist who might have been critically ill, but remained actively engaged. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, compares Traub’s pictures to the early photographs of Alfred Stieglitz or still lifes by Josef Sudek. She also remarking on their complexity. These pictures “are political,” she observes, allowing Traub “to gain a much-needed sense of control in the face of this seemingly out-of-control disease.” And, they are “also symbolic, as he has come to see them as signifying larger issues, such as love, loss, sustenance, and healing.”

About the Artist

Willard Traub is a Massachusetts based photographer whose interests range from the commercial photography of architecture to teaching to fine art photography. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Photography Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Polaroid Foundation Grant, his work is represented in private, museum and corporate collections, both nationally and abroad. The artist currently lives in Wayland, MA and works from his studio at the Saxonville Studios in Framingham.

For more information on the exhibition,

visit the Danforth Museum's website

Milestone

This week John Liz will mark one of those milestone birthdays. In honoring his request for no organized celebratory attempts I will not disclose what day nor which milestone.

John and I started working together on August 26^th, 1985 at Spectrum Color Labs in Boston. A few years later when I left to co-found Color Services I tried to convince him to follow. His loyalty to the late Walter Urbanowicz, Spectrum’s founder, prevailed, leavened I would guess by a certain amount of doubt as to his prospects in joining a startup with little assurance of survival. I tried a couple of times in the ensuing years to convince him to jump ship, to no avail. When Spectrum closed it’s doors suddenly in 2006 there was no real question for either of us and once again we were working together.

I haven’t known a harder working or more dedicated individual. Before most of us are awake each and every morning John is already at work in the lab. He makes everything and everyone around him better. Photography and life still excite him. Anyone who has notched a milestone or two knows how important and rare that is.

One day it is 1985 and as a young fellow you put your head down and set to work at the task at hand. Seemingly overnight it is 2011 and when you look up that youth and those years are rapidly receding in the distance…

For those years and all the good work, thank you John.

Happy birthday from us all.

Jim Dow’s American Studies presents a vision of America at once familiar and foreign; a country constantly reinventing itself visually, both discarding and preserving elements of its past, in a relentless, unplanned process of change.

In American Studies, Dow gives us unpeopled spaces, each resonating with a unique and telling history. A landscape, for Dow, is fashioned by ordinary individuals leaving their mark on their surroundings through everyday acts, unconscious of the enduring effect these changes have on our world. Our signs and billboards, barbershops, office buildings, libraries, pool halls, private clubs, courthouses, and motels—these places belong to a world made primarily by and for American men, and are naturally imbued with that identity.

Obsessive by nature, once praised as “dumb, in the honorific sense of the word,” Dow takes photographs that depict how Americans purposefully create environments and transform their aesthetic power—spiritually, historically, and sometimes commercially. His method has evolved from an early black and white directness, deeply influenced by photography greats Harry Callahan and Walker Evans, to richly detailed color studies of American vernacular culture. In these beautifully realized images, made in every corner of the United States over nearly 40 years of American travel, Dow catalogs aspects of American culture that are seemingly commonplace yet always astonishingly unique.

Jim Dow studied graphic design and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design during the 1960s. From that time forward he has been the recipient of numerous commissions, fellowships, and grants that have allowed him to travel and photograph as well as exhibit and publish extensively. His subjects include folk art, roadside architecture, signs, county courthouses, baseball parks, soccer stadiums, private clubs, barbeque joints, and taco trucks. He is fascinated by the way people leave their mark on both the rural and urban landscape and seeks to preserve this through photography. He lives in Boston and teaches at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Johnny (John) Guy Palladini

Image by Jocelyn Lee

Untitled (John in Albuquerque, NM), 2010

courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery

Johnny (John) Guy Palladini

June 4, 1951 - June 19, 2010

make your last journey

from this strange world

soar for the heights

where there is no more

separation of you and your home.

(Rumi)

Abelardo Morell Farewell Lecture - May 6, 2010

The MassArt Photography Lecture Series presents:

ABELARDO MORELL
Thursday, May 6, 6PM. TOWER AUDITORIUM

After twenty-seven years of dedicated teaching in the Photography Department at MassArt,
Abelardo Morell will be retiring at the end of this semester. Please join us for his farewell lecture.

The lecture is open to the public. All are welcome.


Photography Dept.
Massachusetts College of Art & Design
621 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
617-879-7489

Requiem

Peter Urban

July 1, 1948 - September 13, 2009

I first met Peter five years ago.
I was impressed with his talent and even more his kindness and unassuming airs. Several years passed before I became aware that he was seriously ill; I last saw him at his opening at Gallery Kayafas in April.

It was raining. I walked in with him and he spent fifteen precious minutes with me going through his work, his thoughts on each picture, his hopes for them. His energy and enthusiasm marked his courage.

A man of accomplishment who left behind a world made better by his presence in it.