Manifest Gallery – Season 17 Annual

Manifest Season 17 Annual

Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA is an extraordinary organisation. Not just a gallery exhibiting works from open calls and solo exhibitions, they are an arts education establishment with a broad and inclusive outlook. It encompasses a Drawing centre that explores and promotes, unusually together, drawing and photography and have a  residency program. Also, unusually, they have a prolific publication department producing a huge annual of all the year’s exhibitions, 375 pages for the last one. They also produce, every three years, on a rotating basis an annual of photography, drawing, and painting respectively. The quality of these products is superb.

MEA 17

For the exhibitions all the works are judged in a rigorous blind jury process prioritising quality reducing any curatorial bias or juror prejudice. In the latest season 17 publication there were 41 separate exhibitions of 567 works in total from 319 artists and over 11,000 submissions.

 

 

 

 

MEA 17 – Lost

I may be biased as my first engagement with Manifest was being selected for the last Photography Annual, then a year later for the opening round of the season 17 exhibitions and just this year have had two works again selected. It has presented me with an opportunity to showcase some of my work with an affirmation of their quality. I am extremely proud of this especially in the knowledge of their blind jury process.

My work is photography based, often using or abusing different materials and processes. I think that photography in the US is taken more seriously and accepted as an art form. All of the works I have had accepted by Manifest have been submitted in the UK without success.

What I like most about exhibitions is not necessarily seeing my own work, I know it so well, but viewing it in relation with the others on show, appreciating their work and in the context of the exhibition theme.

Manifest Gallery – Magnitude Seven

I have had two works selected for exhibition in this years Manifest Gallery Magnitude Seven show, in Cincinnati  USA, for small works. The show is of 27 works from 15 artists out of 352 entries from 101 artists. The exhibition is on from June 2nd to 30th.

 

I am especially happy with these two has they originated from the vintage glass plates I exposed 98 years after manufacture. One is a direct contact print of the plate via the argyrotype process (similar to all hand coated prints like platinum/palladium) and the other a photopolymer  intaglio print  mixing modern technology with old methods.

Rebirth
Wrecked Intaglio

D31 Art Gallery – The Magic of Transformation – Spring.

My entries for this exhibition at the D31 Art Gallery in Doncaster opening April 22nd are on display and online.

These four works are printed on photo rag paper which suits the subject well. They are made from the original lumen photograms  I created during the two years of lockdown periods in the the spring. Confined to small spaces one could appreciate whatever flora and fauna was around us continuing to be without restrictions.

See  Lockdown Lumens   post for details of how these were made.

Discerning Eye Exhibition 2022

I am thrilled that all four of my entries into this exhibition have been selected from over 7300 entries.

Weathered Door – Pavelka House

This is a direct positive print made from photographic paper in an 8×10 camera. The image is unique, there is no negative so cannot be reproduced.

It was taken during my residency at the Willa Cather Foundation in 2019.

A very difficult medium to master, with a lot of technical processes to get right. It worked perfectly for this one.

 

 

Contemplation by the Window I

Poverty breeds time. Time to contemplate.

 

Contemplation by the Window II
Summer Evening from the train

 

Modern trains are clinical, cold, uninviting spaces. A languid, warm, time-extending, British summer evening is one of the most inviting spaces. The yearning for one from the other.

 

This print was featured in a review by Aesthetica magazine – https://aestheticamagazine.com/varied-curation/

Lockdown Fed Up

 

This self portrait sums up the  frustrations caused by the present situation. By some stroke of luck I managed to get the focus pretty spot on considering I was the only person involved.

The film was some old Agfa continuous tone duplicating film using my 4×5 camera.

 

First Photo Intaglio print

I did a photopolymer intaglio printing course a year ago. Another involved process which I love. Again the final outcome can be quite different and will a suit certain negatives with a rich tonal range. You have to produce a positive image on a transparency which requires a good inkjet printer and I’m still struggling to source one since my last one packed up. I did however try one with a positive developed photo transparency but would need to experiment with developing and plate exposure.

First intaglio print. Of course I made it even harder by recovering and instant print negative then converting the scanned image to black & white. Not great quality but I can see the potential.

 

 

The digital positive was produced from this instant print recovered negative.

LET THERE BE – exhibition at Manifest Gallery

I am delighted that two works have been selected for this exhibition  – LET THERE BE  – opening on September 25th at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati. The exhibition is a part of a series of five exhibits launching the gallery’s 17th season.

http://www.manifestgallery.org/about/schedule17.html

“For this exhibit 58 artists from 21 states and the countries of Armenia, Australia, England, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand submitted 247 works. Seventeen works by  12 artists from 8 states, and the countries of Armenia, England, and Italy were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.”

These images  were created from the reclaimed negative of  instant print, peel-apart film (old Polaroid type). The negative portion is normally not re-usable and discarded, but if something has a semblance of an image on it I’ll use it somehow. The prints didn’t really work due to light fogging or poor processing, so I did the reclaiming some time later just as an exercise so was a bit sloppy, dismissed them and put them away.

Come lock down, sorting through my negs, I found them, scanned them and got a sort of funky, interesting image, with stains from the dried chemical goop, colour shifts, scratches and bleach marks. Shortly after, I received the late call extension for this exhibition and from the theme these images immediately  came to mind.

It was hard work getting any sort of colour balance  from the material when scanning but from the result felt that they were something special.

apparent failure + serendipitous events = positive outcome

LET THERE BE.
Photo-based Art About Tangibility

Lost

Lost Further