Phantasm - Dreams - Emma Powell

Emma Powell
By Steffen Francisco

The art world today is marked by the burden of the artist to affect change on the greater world around them.  Every piece of art made has to have a Meaning with a capital "M", it has to, in the words of Ghandi, be the change the artist wishes to see in the world.  Not all artists choose to aspire to such lofty goals, however.  Emma Powell is an artist that explores her own mind, her fantasies, dreams and ideas.  Her artwork is stunning and haunting, it stays with you after viewing it and makes you want to see more.  All without needing to have overtones of political change, women's rights, gender identity or whatever other cause is in vogue at the moment.

Powell has several bodies of work that she constructs over years of creation, each a fully explored dissertation on the subject contained therein. Her current work, Svala's Saga, is a collaborative series illustrating a wholly original fairy tale.  The artists use a combination of photographic processes together referred to as "pigment over palladium" to give the images an otherworldly fae feeling without tying them to a single historic era where one or the other of the individual processes would be found.

What draws me to this artist and her work, aside from the pure beauty of it, is the feeling of whimsy and exploration.  Powell seeks to understand her own mind and how it works.  Another of her series, In Search of Sleep, recreates the wild adventures of the kind of stories her father would tell her as a child before bed.  These are not always sweet images and they are not particularly comforting as a whole, but they do serve to induce a wild, dreamscape mindset where odd combinations of ideas are commonplace and the rules are subverted for the purpose of narrative.  These kind of explorations in the realm of art photography, as well as the materials and processes she uses, are what make Powell stand out among photographers.

Ideas/Phantasm - Eastman House

Eastman Museum: A Matter of Memory

By Mandy Litwin

The Eastman Museum located in New York that is named after famous photographer George Eastman. The Eastman Museum, opened in 1949, is known for their grand collections of photography and cinema. They host many exhibitions each year with a wide range of work including photography, cinema, and other works concerning technology.

One exhibition that took place at the end of 2016 was called A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in a Digital Age. It discusses the that fact that much of the photographic images we see today are digital and not physically tangible. It also touches on how our relationship to memory is changing with a constant exposure to images, quite literally every day of our lives. Artists involved in this exhibition produce work that relate to this idea of memory.

LED Lights - Jason Lazarus

One artist in particular is Jason Lazarus. He is a conceptual and experimental photographer. For his series titled “The Rickshaw”, he used played with the idea of a photo as a physical object in a unique way. One piece installed in the gallery mimics the LED lights that are often found framing storefronts in his hometown of Tampa, Florida. Though businesses may have gone under, the lights remain lit, outlining these voids. They symbolize what once was. His other pieces touch on similar ideas.

*Jason Lazarus