11.29.2015

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Toni Pepe


The Second Moment
   Photograph © Toni Pepe    

The Second Moment
   Photograph © Toni Pepe 

The Second Moment
   Photograph © Toni Pepe  
 
I met Toni Pepe while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so….Check out Pepe’s unique images on her website.
The Second Moment
 
Toni Pepe is a Boston-based artist currently teaching photography at Boston University. Her photographs and installation work address the construction of identity and the performativity of narrative, gender, and memory. She is most interested in utilizing photography as a forum for interdisciplinary exploration -- she often employs literature, neuroscience, and cinema as source materials for her work. She has exhibited her images throughout the United States and abroad. Toni’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at the University of Notre Dame and the Center for Photography Woodstock. In addition, Toni was named a 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Program finalist and is currently in the Danforth Museum's collection as well as many private collections.


11.28.2015

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Susan Keiser

Photograph © Susan Keiser        
from the series Flooded in the upcoming exhibition “Illuminate"

I’ve followed the very interesting work of Susan Keiser for several years. I had just chosen one of her images (above) for the upcoming exhibition “Illuminate” I juried for The Center For Fine Art Photography, opening December 4th in Fort Collins, CO. And so I was very pleased to meet Susan again and view her latest work at Filter Photo Festival’s recent Portfolio Review in Chicago. Check out her website link below and be sure to drop in for the exhibition in Colorado if you are nearby.


"An eerie calm descends when the rains cease, the hurricane blows over, an angry god is appeased. Fast-moving water can float things never meant to ride the waves, and strange, often strangely beautiful scenes appear before us. Odd craft drift by—dinette sets, quilted settees—and we wonder at the sight of someone too lost or too tired to swim. We usually envision rivers as flat blue ribbons, but they are deep and layered. As the waters recede we become aware of what sank beneath the surface, adding to the river of memories at the bottom. Floods can be an overflow of water or an outpouring of tears. These are images of the river’s fullness and the heart’s despair. We come from water. We are made of water. And in the end, water not earth will take us." – Susan Keiser

 Photograph © Susan Keiser    

 Photograph © Susan Keiser    


UPCOMING EXHIBITION
“Illuminate” with Juror Elizabeth Avedon

 December 4, 2015 - January 16, 2016
The Center For Fine Art Photography
400 North College Avenue
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Nelson W. Armour

Photographs © Nelson W. Armour 


Photographs © Nelson W. Armour 


I met Nelson W. Armour and reviewed his work, "At Work / At Home, En el Trabajo / En Casa" for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival Portfolio Review in Chicago. I was impressed with his  "American Dream” portrait series of Mexican American landscape worker's at work and then at home with their families. Check out his statement about his work below. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so.... 


Lake County, Illinois, is an excellent place to live. The County boasts of many wealthy suburban communities along with its largest city, Waukegan. Overall, the County is racially and ethnically diverse with a Hispanic/Latino population of over 14%, African American population of almost 7%, and an Asian population of close to 4%.

Yet, depending on your home community, residential diversity is lacking.  In many Lake County communities, most of the service workers are minorities, Latinos or African American. For example, in my town of Highland Park, a majority of landscape crews are Latino.  Many first generation immigrants have started their own landscape businesses or found employment in these enterprises.  Today, many Mexican Americans have pursued the "American Dream" through landscape businesses, either as owners or workers. 

The hard work and effort of these small business people and workers are evident in the well-cared lawns and gardens of the area. These workers contribute to the high quality of life in these communities, but rarely live in them; their homes and communities are often separate from many Lake County suburbs. While visible on the job, they are some times invisible as individuals.

In At Work / At Home, En el Trabajo / En Casa I highlight these workers. Through formal portraits, I hope to bring out their individuality and hard work. Some portraits are paired with another taken in the person's home or community.  This pairing of "at work" and "at home" provides recognition of each individual’s work and personal life.

11.22.2015

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Xu Guanyu

Mirror, from his series, One Land To Another
Photograph © Xu Guanyu

I met Xu Guanyu while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. However, I had chosen his image, Mirror from his series, One Land To Another, as an Honorable Mention in the upcoming "Illuminate" show I juried for The Center For Fine Art Photography opening December 4th in Fort Collins, CO. “Mirror" was also chosen as Directors Honorable Mention by C4FAP’s executive director, Hamidah Glasgow.


"My works are the investigation of my experience of being an Asian gay man in the United States. I use self-portraits, staged photos, and landscapes to explore my struggle of being both a homosexual and a homophobic person. Through my art practice, I question the norm set by the hegemony, including race, sexuality and ideology."

"Born and raised in a conservative family in Beijing, I feared to admit that I’m gay until I came to the United States in 2014. Fortunately, I had chance to experience the global vision through access to the Internet. On the one hand, I learned knowledge of sexual preference. On the other hand, I received the representation of hetero-normative from Hollywood movies. Furthermore, through the Internet, I witnessed the debates between Chinese political and cultural ideology and Western ideology led by the United States. Among these conversations, I found out that I have always been trying to seek and identify a better world, not only as a gay man, but also as a human being."

"The self-portraits of my death not only expresses the inequality of gay men in this world, but also reveals my self-denying and self-hating under the problematic society, which includes both China and U.S. My photographs of people that I find through the online dating apps expose my current situation with other gay men in the States. I examine the racism and discrimination in the white-dominated gay world, the worship of masculinity and the pervasive misogyny in the world. Furthermore, my landscapes of China and America juxtapose hope and apathy as I document  paths to finding a utopian space further complicated by my changing of geographical location as well as psychological movement. The mobility of my practice enables me to interrogate the world."

  
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
“Illuminate” with Juror Elizabeth Avedon
December 4, 2015 - January 16, 2016
The Center For Fine Art Photography
400 North College Avenue
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA


While at Filter Photo Festival, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so. 

11.17.2015

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Francis Crisafio

Photograph © Francis Crisafio

Photograph © Francis Crisafio

I met Francis Crisafio while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so....

“These photographs are taken from an ongoing series that documents an after-school, collaborative arts curriculum rooted in self-portraiture. I co-authored and teach the collaborative to inner city children in Manchester, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA. The program and documentation have run consecutively for 13 years.

"Holdup in the Hood" is both a personal and communal exploration of self. It concerns the sense of identity that comes with the realization of making one’s mark. The photographs incorporate drawings, re-cycled photographs, print media and body gesture to explore issues of race, class and gender.”

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Danielle Voirin

Photograph © Danielle Voirin

Photograph © Danielle Voirin

I met Danielle Voirin while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so....


I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, near Chicago.  After a degree in psychology at DePaul University, I studied photography at Columbia Collage Chicago and EFET in Paris, where I am currently based.  I shoot interiors, travel, and editorial projects.  In parallel to commissions, I have several series of self-portraits that have evolved mainly through artist residencies and are linked through the quest for allowing yourself space to create, pushing through the inner conflicts to finding your own voice. 

Whatever the subject, I aspire to create images of poetry.  Robert Frank articulated the feeling well, in the November 1951 issue of Life when he said, “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”  And when Jay Maisel said, “There was a phrase that Arthur Miller used – ‘I’m trying to create the poem from the evidence.’ I’m not trying to change anything that’s in front of me, I’m trying to give it respect and I’m trying to call attention to it.”

I hope for my photography to be a place you want to spend time. A space of grace and light.  And I think these qualities can be found anywhere we choose to look.

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Carol Erb

Vanity
Photograph © Carol Erb

Photographs © Carol Erb

I met Carol Erb while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so....

The actors have left the stage, the play is over. An old suitcase left behind, an open book, a clock which counts the hours. These images illustrate token memories of my past. A quiet reflective moment where I can remember the things that are gone.

My work typically involves the heavy use of post processing and compositing in Photoshop with complicated assemblages using dozens of layers. There are people, animals, floods and fires, something is happening.

With this series I step back to create a quiet meditative group of photographs with minimal post processing. These images focus on the singular beauty of well worn objects, each one, a piece of my personal history. A place where I can relax and take a deep breath.
 

FILTER PHOTO FESTIVAL 2015: Portfolio Review Round-Up / Leonard Suryajaya

 Photograph © Leonard Suryajaya

Photograph © Leonard Suryajaya

Photograph © Leonard Suryajaya

I met had the great pleasure to meet Leonard Suryajaya while I was a Portfolio Reviewer for the 7th Annual Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. We bonded over Sai Baba and other worldly topics. He was full of interesting fresh ideas coming from a place between two worlds; Indonesia and America. While at Filter, I reviewed over 60 photographers portfolio’s and/or book projects. I'll try to post as many as possible over the next month or so....


Influenced by the cultural milieu of experiencing intra-ethnic relations in Indonesia, my work explores intricate and complicated layers of selfhood in the context of cultural background, intimacy, sexual preference, and personal displacement. By utilizing photography, video, along with elements of performance and installation, through the use of personal narrative and story telling, my work challenges and deconstructs the perspective we use to scrutinize and observe our roles in a transnational global world.

Oppression and suppression were the themes of my childhood. Events, such as my grandfather fleeing the communist regime, eradication of Chinese culture by the Indonesian government, and escaping genocides framed my upbringing. As a second generation “Indonesian Citizen of an Alien Descent”, I was raised to witness constant cultural and religious clashes.


Although my parents are Buddhists, they put me in Christian schools to ensure a good education. But it was largely a Muslim woman, my “other” mother, who raised me. Early on, this constant “placelessness” within paradigms of self-identification urged me to someday reconcile these discrepancies.

The discovery of my sexuality also deeply alienated me from my home and family. My traditional family and conservative country didn’t permit fluid gender expression and homosexuality, so I suppressed my individuality and conformed.

I learned that my body, as the projection surface of my selfhood, is a battleground. Although it is a medium of my autonomy, it is also a medium of my oppression. I realized how my physical appearance and my cultural markings resulted in hostility against me. I realize that I was already queer before I was a homosexual.

Despite finding a new sense of freedom and agency in America, I understand that fleeing my family and country is not the solution to the ambivalence I feel about my upbringing. I am unable to fully desire this past, also unable to properly mourn its loss. Constantly placeless, confused about the validity of my familial relationships, and skeptical about the validity of my identity in the setting I am in, I never understood what sense of belonging is like.

Through an absence of physical and verbal affection in my upbringing, I use the visual medium to produce a new language of intimacy and longing. The desire for closeness, accompanied by apprehension, guides me in my exploration. I found myself using photography as an excuse to construct a new and more privately familiar world.

I use personal narratives and relationships to challenge the ubiquity of the lens based medium and exoticism in looking in creating visual experiences for the viewer to respond to. The possibilities and limitations of the lens-based mediums provide the perfect expression of an ambivalent identity. Photographs and videos provoke the viewer’s awareness of their own questions, and answer by revealing both more and less than what it is seen. It is my ambition to use my own confusing background in work that expands the viewer’s understanding of identity—both their own, and other’s. And in the process, I hope to challenge conflicting conceptions of personal and cultural identities, intimacy, physical boundaries, gender roles, sexuality, queerness and freedom.