Gallery19: Photo Competition

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Meed4: The Power of Identity - Finalists

Gallery 19 is ready to announce our three finalists for our competition: Meed4: The Power of Identity! This year's juror, Tersa Magaña, got back to us with her decision, and we are happy to introduce them to you all. The three finalists for Meed4: The Power of Identity are: Thad Higa, Melinda Ruth and Corinne Whittmore.

Thad Higa (b. 1989) originates from San Jose, California, and was raised in Hawaii. Studied Creative Writing in Seattle, Washington. Ate some donuts in Oregon. Hawked some homemade books in New York. Currently resides in Honolulu.

Melinda Ruth is an up and coming sketch artist focusing on portraits and realism. She was born in Scranton Pennsylvania and grew up in Dallas Texas with her two older and one younger sister. As a child, she was drawn to bright colors and vibrant imagery. She often aimed to wear as many colors as possible despite others finding her style hilarious. Art was always one of her favorite classes and drawing was always her preferred medium. The summer before 3rd grade, Melinda's parents separated which became a major turning point in her life. The depth of her parents' volatile relationship came to a head when her mother endured an altercation with her father that resulted in her mother being hospitalized. With a high school education and limited work experience, Melinda's mother made the challenging decision to remove herself and four daughters from the household. As a result of the separation, Melinda's family was immediately met with the financial skint of a single mother raising 4 daughters with little to no help.

Despite the ups and downs Melinda Ruth experienced growing up in poverty, she still saw art as a way to express herself. Eventually, after graduating from high school, she decided to minor in Studio Art at the University of Houston. It was through her studies she developed the techniques needed to create realistic portrayals of the human experience. As an African American female, Melinda has centered her art on challenging the negative messages society fosters of blacks, while encouraging her people. Melinda has faced a number of challenges in overcoming limitations due to her upbringing as well as the opportunities presented when others reach back into the community to promote prosperity. Therefore, as a practicing social worker, public health doctoral student and artist, Melinda Ruth seeks to use her art and any platform awarded to give hope and a voice to those whose voices have been silenced.

Corinne Whittemore is an artist, single mother, graphic designer and educator. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, received her MFA in Visual Communications from the University of Arizona and has been teaching at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley for the past five years in graphic design. Corinne has worked in the field of graphic design for over fifteen years as a Production Artist, Graphic Designer, Marketing Coordinator and Freelancer on both the East and West Coasts. She lived, most recently, in Virginia Beach, VA before moving back to the Valley in 2014. Having grown up in the Valley, Corinne has first-hand experience with its unique border culture and has focused her research and artwork around the hybridity of the borderlands. She has continued to exhibit her work locally, nationally and internationally.

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Photographing Rochester one pay phone at a time

By David Andreatta @david_andreatta

Eric Kunsman, cradling a Hasselblad camera in his hands, stood at the intersection of Grape and Orange streets on Rochester's west side on a dreary Tuesday morning sizing up his latest subject.

To the untrained eye, there wasn't much to look at; just a closed corner store with wire mesh on its door. But Kunsman, a professional photographer and lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, saw in the grim backdrop something special: A pair of pay phones.

Eric Kunsman

PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE 

"What's that man doing?" a boy on a bicycle asked.

"Taking pictures of pay phones," I replied. "Have you ever used one?"

"Uh-uh," the boy said with a shake of his head as he pedaled away.

For nearly two years, Kunsman has been photographing Rochester and its suburbs one pay phone at a time.

"They're my babies," he said. "They're like my children in many ways. There's an experience in finding them."

Finding them has gotten harder. Once ubiquitous symbols of freedom, mobility, and salvation, pay phones have been rapidly vanishing since the advent of the mobile phone.

From their peak at 2.1 million units nationwide in 1999, pay phones today number fewer than 100,000, according to Federal Communications Commission. In Monroe County, there are fewer than 1,700, about a third of the number there were at the turn of the century.

They have not gone down quietly. The decline of the pay phone has been chronicled – some might say lamented – in news articles, documentaries, and on social media channels under hashtags like #payphoneography and the popular Instagram account @payphones, that pay homage to the outdated technology and its role in society.

Pay phones have rescued countless stranded motorists, delivered joyous news of births from maternity wards, and informed untold numbers of spouses that their better halves would be late for dinner.

"For decades, we handled all of your drug deals, love affairs, runaways, pimps, crime tips, cranks, heavy breathers, and emergencies," one of the last phone booths in Brooklyn growled in voiceover in the 2016 short documentary, "Dead Ringer." "You name it, we heard it all."

But Kunsman's pursuit is not a saccharine ode to pay phones. He doesn't romanticize them or wax nostalgic. His photography, he said, is about chronicling pay phones as social markers of race, class, and economics in greater Rochester.

"This project is more about the environment these phones are in and trying to tell the stories of those environments," he said.

In his studio a few blocks away, he thumbed through a stack of hundreds of black-and-white images on oversized matte paper, recounting a story with each one.

There was the pair of pay phones outside the 490 Motel, the vandalized modern model standing in contrast to its pristine, older counterpart. There was the quaint phone booth in Pittsford. There was the pay phone that outlasted the vacant T-Mobile store in the background on State Street.

These are not snapshots. They are carefully considered portraits that evoke a relationship between a bygone technology and its surroundings. The photos, all black-and-white, are largely devoid of people, giving them a post-apocalyptic feel that is simultaneously beautiful and eerie and recalls the rise and fall of civilization.

Some of his photos don't feature a pay phone at all, but rather a discolored wall where one had been mounted. In one such image he captured inside the Genesee Brewery, phone numbers for the union and take-out eateries were scrawled on the wall around the ghostly outline of what was a pay phone.

Two galleries, CEPA Gallery in Buffalo and Gallery 19 in Chicago, have already agreed to exhibit his work in 2021.

Link below of the original article; 

https://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/meet-the-man-chronicling-rochesters-pay-phones/Content?oid=10981842

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Meed4: The Power of Identity

We are honored to have Teresa Magaña  preside over the 2020-2021 Gallery19's Meed4 competition. Teresa Magaña has established herself as a mixed media artist, educator, curator, and gallery owner. Her work is rooted and heavily influenced by her Mexican and Chicana identity. As owner of Pilsen Outpost Teresa continues to support and develop emerging artists by offering her gallery as a place for artists seeking the opportunity to express themselves visually.  

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Meed3: Winner Eric Kunsman

Statement: In 2017, I relocated my studio to a different part of Rochester, NY. Colleagues immediately started making comments along the lines of: “...that area's a war zone.” My experience with the new neighborhood was positive, so I wanted to discover what visual cues others might be seeing as indicators of a dangerous environment. Several people had mentioned the number of payphones in the area, inferring that only criminals use payphones these days.

Witnessing that type of reflexive judgment from my colleagues drove me to educate myself. I am photographing payphones and mapping their locations, then overlaying them with census maps showing economic status, ethnicity, age and sex, and the city crime map. There is an immediate, direct correlation between the poverty level and location of the payphones. Areas with the most payphones coincide with Rochester neighborhoods where the average family incomes are lower than $20,000 annually. I am not seeing a correlation with high crime neighborhoods.

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On Process: Pt.02

In the first part of my discussion of this process, I detailed how I came up with the source imagery for this project.  I focused primarily on my use of the scanner to repurpose and/or deconstruct my previous work.  However, as this is a multi-layered process of creating imagery, there is more behind the entire process than simply creating source imagery with the scanner.

The second main part of my process occurs somewhat simultaneously with the first.  I use a stylus and tablet-like piece of hardware to create what I refer to as “digital sketches”, as they are operated using the same physical act of drawing with a pen or pencil on paper, but the output is digital rather than physical.  These sketches are improvised and created in one go, comparable to a stream-of-consciousness poem or improvised musical performance, allowing the influence of environment, experimentation, and the subconscious reverberations of the source imagery I have created, to take precedence over calculated creation.  By improvising within a set of restrictions, it allows for experimentation and accidents within what would otherwise likely be considered a rigid set of rules that I have laid out for myself.  Each step of the process informs what happens with the other, either consciously or subconsciously and in varying degrees, as I go back and forth between steps of the process.

There are a few similarities that I have found between my process and improvised, or semi-improvised musical performances.  For example, the same song may be played numerous times in different environments and contexts.  Although the song is essentially the same, the exact performance, feeling, and aura can never be replicated, due to the fact that the musicians (multi-layered parts of a whole) are performing in reaction to each others’ changing energy, emotions, and creative direction.  To put it more plainly, what the drummer is doing informs what the horns, etc. play and vice-versa.  Similarly, my sketches, although improvised, may metaphorically circle ideas or aesthetic aspects of the scanned source imagery, and vice-versa.

The use of a reprise is another musical metaphor that can be drawn from this process as well.  A reprise in music is a repetition and/or reiteration of a selection or entirety of a piece of music, often with additional embellishments. The original pieces that are used to create source imagery are subjected to a reprise within the process when they are scanned and manipulated, creating a unique piece that still retains some semblance of the original.  Another reprise is subsequently carried out once again when the image is applied to the sketches, and once more when all of these parts are put together into what is considered the final piece.

Additionally, besides the reprise being a cog in the machine of my process, it also illuminates some very personal characteristics within my work that may reflect my thought process and psychological state.  My work typically uses repetition, repurposing, and obsessive layering of elements.  My thoughts and feelings are also often dictated by layers of ideas, obsessions, and worries that all interact and inform each other, making it difficult to process and express what I am thinking, especially when not much time is available to rearrange those thoughts into cohesive sentences.

This leads me to my final thought regarding my personal connection to this work, which is that while some (including myself) may argue that my non-representational work has nothing to do with me, in actuality, it is a more truthful representation of myself than a self portrait would be, considering that the work functions for the viewer in almost the same fashion that my mind processes my thoughts, decisions, etc.  Therefore, the viewer is still able to interpret and experience the work as they like without it being inaccessible.

-Chandler

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On Process: Pt.01

Inventing new ways of creating imagery while exploring and blurring the boundaries where photography and other mediums intersect is one of the most central aspects to my creative practice.  I consider myself a visual artist rather than a photographer in order to avoid tired, traditionalist traps built inherently into photography (I think these are even more-so “built-into” photography than other mediums). However, coming from a primarily photography based background, I do typically start out with photo- or lens-based processes.  My process is paramount to my practice, allowing me a framework or some loose set of self-imposed rules to work within that still allow for “accidents” and experimentation within that process.  This way of creating imagery allows for the use, misuse, and combination of any and all tools, mediums, technologies, etc. necessary.

This brings me to another important aspect of my practice which is the cycle of creation, deconstruction, and repurposing/reconstruction of pieces that would otherwise be considered complete already.  For example, the source imagery used to create each new piece in this project comes from deconstructing my older photographs, collages, and/or paintings by manipulating what the scanner is trying to reproduce.  By moving the image while it is being scanned (as pictured below), I can intentionally manipulate it in a way that distorts the original according to my specific hand movements, creating a new image that is unrecognizable from the original.  This act allows an additional, almost performative aspect to be introduced into the process as well as a push-pull between the physical/analog process and the digital process.  The original, as some may argue, does not lose its “aura” as an individual artwork by being reproduced, but manifests as a new piece with its own unique aura that cannot be replicated due to the improvisational manner by which it was created. These scanned images are just one piece of my multi-layered process that form the backbone of what I intend to create.

-Chandler

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Chandler Smith

Untitled Work in Progress 03 (detail), 2019

Archival Pigment Print, Hand Manipulated Scanned Acrylic Painting on Arches Cold Press, Digital Sketch

Dimensions N/A

for forthcoming show at Gallery19 Chicago

Be on the lookout for some text and image posts of my thought process and the creative processes behind this new work in the coming week.

-Chandler

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Chandler Smith

Untitled Work in Progress 02 (detail), 2019

Archival Pigment Print, Hand Manipulated Scanned Chromogenic Print, Digital Sketch

Dimensions N/A

for forthcoming solo exhibition at Gallery19 Chicago

-Chandler

p.s. To view edits/updates please view these posts on the Gallery19 Tumblr page or on Chandler Smith’s Tumblr page, as the website for Gallery19 reformats the posts and does not allow for edits of posts to be updated.

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Chandler Smith

Untitled Work In Progress 01, (Detail of Two Variations), 2019

Archival Pigment Print, Hand Manipulated Scanned Chromogenic Print, Digital Sketch

Dimensions N/A

for forthcoming solo exhibition at Gallery19 Chicago

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Updates

Well I had a couple of fun & exciting ideas for the blog these past weeks, however, they involved other people’s participation and those people have been very busy so I will have to postpone those ideas until a later week.  In the meantime, be on the lookout for some brand new WIP detail shots coming soon! 

p.s. I encourage you to view these on the Tumblr page rather than the Gallery19 website, as the website does not format the posts the same way the blog does and does not update any edits I make.

-Chandler

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BACKGROUND

Let me just preface this by saying that I do not like talking about myself and giving out personal information, but I will attempt to make an at least semi-interesting post about myself without too many personal details included. Also, I renamed this post “Background” rather than “About Me” after I realized its more-so vague background information than anything about me. You’ll learn more about me through these posts whether that’s directly or indirectly.

I grew up outside of North-Eastern Rhode Island and I am currently based in Chicago. Now that you have all that important background information on me to reference, I will talk a bit about myself currently...

I graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2018 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art Photography and was one class  away from having a degree in Audio Design & Production as well.  After transferring to Columbia College Chicago from Belmont University, I picked up a minor in photography, which soon became a double major due to my rapidly growing interest and excitement in photography and visual art as well as my flat-lining of interest in the audio program I was in at the time.  I am still working with audio and sound-art, and potentially in a music group (more to come on that...maybe...), but it is my interest in integrating sound & vision (Bowie fans out there?!?) that continues to keep me interested in the non-musical part of audio and sound. Actually, integration of any and all mediums/tools necessary is a major part of my practice that I’m sure I will get into fairly soon.  If you’re anxious to find out more on that, you can read my interview with VoyageChicago (If I’m remembering correctly, I speak on that subject borderline obsessively in that interview).

During my time at Columbia College, I was employed by the photography department in the photo studio and digital lab, but I primarily worked in the B&W/Alt.Processes/Color Darkrooms.  Not long after transferring there, I added photography as my second major and was soon being asked to show my work in exhibitions alongside photographers and visual artists of far higher caliber than myself, including Julie Weber, Elina Ruka, Daniel Hojnaki, Kristen Kula, Carissa Meier, Deborah Orloff, Kate Pollard Hoffmann, and David Samuel Stern just to name a few.  (Is name dropping a good thing or a bad thing? I’m going to link their websites below as well because they all make fresh, fantastic, and challenging photo-based visual art.)

I showcased my first public installation piece, alongside four of my pieces that were chosen for the Gallery19:MEED2 exhibition at a show entitled Pushed Processes, curated by the wonderful Alison Carey.  Prior to both of the previously mentioned shows, I was chosen to exhibit my work at the residence of Dr. Kwang-Wu Kim, President of Columbia College Chicago for a few months.  In August I was one of five chosen for a juried exhibition at Gallery19′s exhibition MEED2, and was chosen by artist, curator, and judge of this exhibition, Juan Fernandez as the winner as I’m sure you are aware of by this point.

That was all a very general summary of recent accomplishments, etc. So If you have any other questions for me, feel free to submit them as usual! Thanks everyone!

-Chandler

Up Next: MY PROCESS (for An Approximation) including video & images.

                                      Links:

VoyageChicago Interview

Julie Weber     Elina Ruka     Daniel Hojnaki     Kristen Kula     Carissa Meier    Deborah Orloff     Kate Pollard Hoffmann     David Samuel Stern

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INTRODUCING Chandler Smith

Hello everyone! My name is Chandler Smith and I will be posting on Gallery19′s Tumblr page for the next few months!  First of all, I just want to say thanks to Tommy Reyes and Gallery19 for allowing me the opportunity to post on here for my upcoming solo show at the end of the summer, and to Juan Fernandez, who curated the Meed2:New Abstraction exhibition and who I will be working with leading up to my solo show.

This is pretty much my first time blogging, and the only social media I use is Instagram (but haven’t touched it since October, oops!).  So what I’m trying to say is to just bear with me while I get the hang of this.

I’m planning to be posting at least once every week. You can probably expect to see some more frequent as well as more formal and informational posts like this one for the next week or so, but I am anticipating that there will continue to be more work-in-progress thoughts and images as the weeks go by and I get into a good groove with the project.  I may decide to throw in some random influences. etc. (music, books, art/artists) that may help give a glimpse into what I am interested in, what is affecting the project, or maybe just some generally entertaining posts.

You can check out some of my work on my website and some of my current thoughts and work in progress on my Tumblr page.  If you’re reading this on my personal Tumblr page, I’d recommend going to Gallery19′s Tumblr page to check out what I’m posting because it may differ slightly from my page.  If you have any questions I encourage you to ask them, I should have a module for that on my Tumblr page.

Thanks for reading! Make sure to follow Gallery19 and my page to keep up to date with my process and progression.

UP NEXT: About Me

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Jackson Patterson: Recollected Memories

Dates: July 6 - Aug 4, 2018

Opening Reception, July 20th, 6-9pm, 2018

Chicago Artist Jackson Patterson is the winner of Gallery19’s inaugural Meed1 Photo Competition (2017/18). The artist entered the contest with work from his Recollected Memories series; an intense exploration of his family history and the western landscapes they were surrounded by. As part of Patterson's prize, he received a solo show at the gallery (running 07/6/18 – 08/04/18), along with a full year of mentorship by Meed1 Judge Jennifer Murray. Murray, who is the executive director of the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago, helped Patterson develop his fascinating series and pushed it to the next level. Together they explored compositions and concepts. The year-long collaboration has yielded stunning results, which can be seen at the gallery throughout July.

Patterson’s montages are the annihilation of space and time through the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, and how it transformed American life. His exploration of the westward migration is focused on images he has taken of timeless landscapes merged with old family photos, and the personal history that lies within.

Recollected Memories opens July 6th and runs through August 4th, 2018. Opening reception is Friday, July 20thfrom 6-9pm, with an artists’ talk at 7pm.  Bites and beverages always served. Gallery19 is located at 4839 N. Damen Ave. 773-420-8071.

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Listen to the interview with the 2017 winner of Gallery19's Meed1 Photo Competition for advice on entering our current contest, as well as his own creative growth over the past year!

https://soundcloud.com/user-240012424/jackson-patterson-at-gallery19

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The winner of Gallery19 Meed2 will receive a solo show at Gallery19 for the month of August, 2019.  The winner will also have a one-year contract with Gallery19, which includes exposure on the gallery’s website, ongoing multi-media, promotion, including social media, participation in gallery programming (openings, events, artist talks, etc.), and direct sales efforts.  In addition, Juan Fernandez will mentor the winner for a full year August 2018 through August 2019, by reviewing and evaluating work product, and assisting in development of a gallery-ready exhibition, all culminating in a solo exhibition at Gallery19.

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Want more information on our Meed2 Photo Competition? Listen to Gallery19 Co-Owner Tommy Reyes chat with Meed2 Judge Juan Fernandez about this year’s theme and what they’re looking for in terms of entries!

https://soundcloud.com/user-240012424/gallery19-photo-competition-a-conversation