 |
| Tina
Barney, The Print Dress, 2016. Chromogenic color print, 40 x 50 inches.
Copyright Tina Barney, Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery |
The exhibition, In Place: Contemporary Photographers
Envision a Museum, on view at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut,
October 1, 2016, through January 29, 2017, brings together artists Tina
Barney, Marion Belanger, Adrien Broom, Kate Cordsen, Peter Daitch, Alida Fish, Ted
Hendrickson, Sophie Lvoff, James Welling, and Tom Zetterstrom. The
site of the Florence Griswold Museum has been a place of creative inspiration
to artists for over a century. The painters of the Lyme Art Colony, who stayed
at “Miss Florence’s” boardinghouse beginning in 1899, turned her property and
the surrounding landscape into subjects of iconic works of American art. With this history in mind, this select group of
photographers was asked to focus their lenses and
imagination on the Museum and create work that reacts to the historic site’s
landscape, collections, and story. “While motifs of art, history, and landscape emerge in the
photographers’ works, the variety of their expressions articulates how
multifaceted the discipline of photography is today,” notes Amy Kurtz Lansing,
Curator at the Florence Griswold Museum. “Visitors will find a range of art,
from representational to abstract, from film to video, and from historical to
digital processes.”
In
Place came
about because of a milestone celebrated recently at the Museum. Eight
decades ago, as Florence Griswold neared the end of her life, the riverside
property she cherished was sold to pay her mounting debts. Between its founding
in the 1940s and the late 1990s, the Florence Griswold Museum gradually
reassembled these pieces of land, forming a historic site of over 11 acres. In
2016, the last remaining parcel in private hands was purchased by the Museum,
restoring Miss Florence’s original 13-acre estate. Through In Place, the
photographers draw attention to unfamiliar edges and hidden treasures, delve
into the past, and create narratives that reflect on personal histories and on
the legacy of the art colony that came before them.
Time
and Nature
Four
photographers, Marion Belanger, Alida Fish, Ted Hendrickson, and Tom Zetterstrom
consider the historic site in terms of nature and time’s passage. Belanger immersed
herself in the museum’s landscape and collections, creating three studies—Garden
Study, Ranch House, and Outside Edge—that appear as printed
books (published by Roman Nvmerals), and as photographs on the wall. These
images are juxtaposed with a video/sound piece and archival remnants that
informed Belanger’s research. Her project investigates how boundaries reflect
changes upon the land and demarcate differences between the familiar and the
unknown, the contained and the wild. With a wry sense of humor and playing off
his interest in the intersections between time and place, Hendrickson surveys
the evolution of the museum’s landscape over the course of a year for his Lawn
Series. These images and his others demonstrate changes not only
in the passage of the seasons, but also the way visitors, and even mice,
contemplate, occupy, and modify the landscape. Fish, who is the
granddaughter of one of the Lyme Art Colony painters, delves into the artist
Willard Metcalf’s naturalist collection, which is housed at the museum. In her
work, Fish seeks to create a world of her own invention from these organic
materials, stating, “Time has taken its toll on many of the pieces. It is the
persistent beauty of the objects that most interests me—especially the
fragility of the butterflies and moths.” She shoots with a digital camera, and
then turns to historic methods to process the images, transferring her archival
pigment print photographs onto oxidized aluminum plates. The product is a
unique object with a textured surface and an ethereal silvery hue that
echoes that of the moths and butterflies depicted. Zetterstrom is
known for his photography of North American trees and landscape, and as an
engaged tree preservationist and activist. For him, the Museum’s campus was a
rich natural resource to explore and interpret. Zetterstrom choose to shoot in
winter in order to better examine the scale and relationship of the trees to
the surrounding architecture, a reflection of the artist’s longtime interest in
changes to the New England agrarian landscape.
Abstraction
and Connection
Kate
Cordsen, Peter Daitch, and Sophie Lvoff approached their consideration of place
in abstract terms, producing work that takes the museum as a point of departure
for formal and conceptual contemplation. Cordsen invokes the
abstract works of Harry Holtzman and Piet Mondrian in the Museum’s
collection as the starting point for her work in the historic medium of
cyanotype. Using abstract forms, she composes her large-format photographs
through a demanding process that requires both physical, painterly dynamism,
and chemical precision. In this way, Cordsen explores the tension between
chance, accident, and control. For her large-scale Murmurations (Cyanotype
on gessoed linen, 51 x 120 inches) Cordsen uses pliage, a fabric folding
technique, to create the whirling arcs of the migrating swallows that swoop and
soar over the nearby Connecticut River. Daitch takes landscape
and architecture as a starting point, but uses his camera to transform and
simplify them into formal elements of light, color, and shape. His work recalls
that of the Tonalist painters who visited Old Lyme in its rendering of the
landscape in subjective terms. Lvoff’s project operates on
several levels. She researched Florence Griswold and the community of artists
she created, the museum that has grown into, and the town whose enduring
tourist appeal derives from those historical connections. Using a historic
process, Van Dyke brown prints, in which the photographic emulsion is applied
in painterly strokes to create a sepia-toned image, Lvoff replicated
transparencies of paintings and historic photographs from the museum’s
collection. As a tribute to the legacy of the artists who have come before her,
Lvoff took color photographs of icons in the town such as the Griswold house
and the First Congregational Church, as well as a barbershop shot in homage to
the legendary vernacular photographer Walker Evans, who lived in Lyme. Lvoff’s
multimedia installation incorporates postcard records of her research, archival
objects, and film footage.
Houses
and Stories
Artists
Tina Barney, Adrien Broom, and James Welling use the iconic Griswold House as a
catalyst for their work. A pioneer of large color photography as fine
art, Barney continues her exploration of the visual and
emotional connections between people and their surrounds using the historic
Griswold House as a backdrop. “I’m interested in relationships, people, the way they move and
the way they walk, the way a room is set up. The sociological. It’s like I have
blinders on,” Barney states. “I see the formal parts of putting a picture
together, paired with the human figure, and human emotions.” Barney describes
the Griswold house as a “visual feast” that served as “mysterious and timeless”
stage set for her models. Broom, known for her elaborately
constructed and often fantastical scenes, uses the Griswold House as a muse for
a narrative that invokes memory, loss, and the continuity of relationships over
time. A model placed in the historic rooms recalls Florence Griswold and the
community of friends she created. Broom’s use of dramatic staging and lighting
in her images suggests that the legacy of Miss Florence and the artists
poignantly endures. Welling explores the museum and artistic
heritage of the area through the lens of family history and his personal
experience as an artist who first shot photographs in Old Lyme in the 1970s. A
groundbreaking photographer who has pushed the medium in new directions through
experimental color photographs and camera-less photograms, Welling returns to
conventional methods for his continuing Life Studies series,
of which the recent Old Lyme work is part. Welling turns everyday household
objects and fragments of architecture into springboards for remembrance,
completing a family narrative that began eighty-five years ago when his
grandfather studied art with Lyme Impressionist painter Wilson Henry Irvine.
Most
of the ten photographers selected for In Place are established
artists; they have challenged their medium, constantly exploring technique and
theme in new directions prompted by this project. Several are younger, emerging
artists who continue to push themselves and their art in exciting ways. In a
world where virtual images inundate society through digital channels, these
photographers have rediscovered on the viewer’s behalf the inspiring,
fulfilling, and thought-provoking potential for connection to place.
Florence
Griswold Museum
The recipient
of a Trip Advisor 2015 Certificate of Excellence, the Florence Griswold Museum
has been called a “Giverny in Connecticut” by the Wall Street Journal, and a
“must-see” by the Boston Globe. In addition to the restored Florence
Griswold House, the Museum features a gallery for changing art exhibitions,
education and landscape centers, a restored artist’s studio, thirteen acres
along the Lieutenant River, and extensive gardens. The Museum is located
at 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, Connecticut. Visit www.FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org
for more information.
