Picture Society presents a multi-media film and photographic exhibition for the Month of Photography at Space Gallery in Denver on March 15. The slideshow, “Picture Society: Month of Photography” features the narrative fine art photography of Nancy Baron, Chris Buck, Rania Matar, Alvaro Deprit and Gregory Spaid set to music with audio dialogue and descriptions by the photographers overlaid creating a 40-minute fine art film. The accompanying exhibition “In Query” features the works of previous Picture Society participants: Jonathan Blaustein, Benjamin Rasmussen, Annie Marie Musselman and Dave Woody.
“In Query,” the visual exhibition of works by Blaustein, Rasmussen, Musselman and Woody is a collection of images exploring the human condition and identity through possessions, place and home, injured wildlife and the intimate closeness of a portrait. Each artist is showing a complete body of work focused on an individual query or question as described below.
Jonathan Blaustein – “Mine”
“Everything you see in these photographs is mine. My farm. My property. My nature. I own it,” Blaustein writes. Blaustein mined the natural resources on his land in northern New Mexico for a year and removed the artifacts to his studio and fabricated the animals and objects into sculptures to be photographed, turning them into products and commodities. He envisions this series of photographs as the first products offered by the Blaustein Mining Company, the artist’s corporate alter ego. As such, “Mine” is an ongoing project and the images are a direct representation of both the artists’ creative practice and the capitalistic behavior through which society extracts from the Earth for material gain.
Benjamin Rasmussen — “Home”
Benjamin Rasmussen is a photographer based in Denver, Colorado. He spent his childhood with an indigenous group of people on an island in the southern Philippines, his university years with evangelicals in a small town in northern Arkansas, and a year with the descendants of Vikings in the Faroe Islands, a nation of 45,000 residents in the middle of the North Atlantic. His photographs explore the notion of place and home and he utilizes his nephew as a stand-in for self-portrait in the series.
Annie Marie Musselman — “Finding Trust”
Her first personal project, “Finding Trust,” began 7 years ago at a wildlife sanctuary near Seattle. It has been featured in several magazines and exhibitions. “I strive to confront the destructive side of human impact on the survival of all wild creatures,” Musselman says. Currently she is working on a project photographing animals in specific sanctuaries around the world to raise awareness of the fragility and beauty of endangered/indicator species – animals which if saved, would save countless other species as well.
Dave Woody — “Portraits”
Woody investigates how we present ourselves to the world through the clothes we wear, the make-up and the sense of self-image. “It’s a desire on my part to find a softness in people behind their presentation of self to the world,” Woody says. His camera lingers on a rumpled bit of clothing, or an imperfection in skin, which allows the viewer to get a sense of the person behind the image. The images are meant in size (about life-sized) and clarity to feel as if the person photographed has allowed the viewer to enter their personal space and to sit with them in an intimate closeness. A rare opportunity.
Picture Society was founded by Sarah LaVigne, photo editor at 5280 Magazine to showcase bodies of work from renowned and emerging photographers around the world. LaVigne holds an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and worked as the photo editor for numerous magazines. She curates photography exhibitions and does portfolio reviews across the Southwest region and curated “In Query” for Space Gallery. Picture Society films are co-curated by Julia Vandenoever formerly the photo editor at Backpacker, Skiing and Outside magazines.
EXHIBITION
Picture Society: In Query
From March 15, 2013
Space Gallery
765 Santa Fe Drive
Denver, CO
USA
