"Contemporarious...we are a web of photographers, whose work belongs in the present. media has connected us and we are connected to it as we embrace or resist it's pull on our creative pulse, we come together in time."
I have 35 images represented in 9 photographs in the exhibit,
"Contemporarious" that opened last night, September 3rd, at the
Eastern Arts Center in Fairhope, Alabamba. The exhibit will be on exhibit until October 2nd. The Eastern Arts Center is located at 401 Oak Street.
My images were selected by curator and photographer Kristy Johnson-Snell. She selected 5 images from my Nicaragua series and 30
hipstamatic images taken on my camera phone and montaged the images into 4 photographs with 5 images each.
Hipstamatic Montage
Below is my artist statement and images for sale in the exhibit.
My photographs in this exhibit reveal personal moments, contemporary moments that are still breathing and antiquated ones once so real but only alive as images yet still evoking present-day emotions.
These moments were captured with a film camera, a simple digital point and shoot camera, and a mobile camera phone. I take these pictures as a first time mother, a wife, a Californian living in New York, and a Peace Corps volunteer in love with Nicaragua and her people.
My hipstamatic prints taken on my camera phone document 2010 summer adventures with my son and husband in our current temporary home of Brooklyn, New York.
Summer Brooklyn
Summer Brooklyn and
Summer Diversions shows how much Yo Amo NY from brownstones in Bed-Stuy, to views of the island. I love NY in the sounds of sirens, the sight of sunsets, the taste ofSu ice cream and the thrill of a full moon roller coaster ride in Coney Island while humming MJ’s Remember the Time. Longing for a taste of Latin America, a place once so familiar sends me to the Red Hook Ballparks to eat traditional Salvadoran Pupusas (corn tortillas filled with beans and cheese) and drink Mexican horchata (cinnamon rice milk) and agua de flor de jamaica (hibiscus tea).
Summer Diversions
Summer Baby shows my beautiful baby, my sweet Wendell B, and his first summer...from tummy time to sleepy time, to silly faces, spit bubbles and discovering his hands. Lets not forget my belly and her beauty marks to remember where my baby boy grew for 9 months, his home last summer. I could photograph my son and document motherhood all day!
Summer Baby
Summer Junctures are fleeting moments from when summer just began and now summer is being locked away just like those preschool bikes. Remembering our first trip to the National Zoo in DC, World Cup fever on the NY subway and the security fence next to our former apartment building. The summer series ends with a weathered balloon, once wishing someone a Happy Birthday finding a resting place.
Summer Junctures
My Nicaraguan photographs are from 2003-2006 taken in the towns of Karawala, Bluefields and Altagracia where my husband and I served as Peace Corps Volunteers and fell in love with our son’s namesake, the writer Wendell Berry. These images were taken with both my film camera and a simple digital point and shoot camera. These images while of the past could communicate an emotion parallel to that of the recent gulf disaster-a calm before the storm.
Melvin on the Wharf of Karawala
Melvin on the Wharf of Karawala shows the entrance to the Miskito village on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The Miskitos are Native Americans from the Mosquito Coast. Many Karawalans were mixed African-Indigenous Central Americans speaking Ulwa, Miskitu, Creole and Spanish. Melvin was my best friend Rosa’s son. In the background you can see the wooden homes on stilts made from the pine trees in the basukra. Unfortunately in November of 2009 Hurricane Ida landed in Karawala destroying 80% of these homes.
Basukra
Basukra is the home to the beautiful pine trees out in the bush of Karawala. Melvin and his cousin Luis are jumping off a makeshift bridge that was destroyed by a previous Hurricane in 2004- Hurricane Beta. Busukra is where I got my Karawalan nickname,
Liwa Mairin, mermaid in Miskitu.
Sara the Midwife
Sara the Midwife is Melvin's grandma. This photograph was taken in Bluefields Nicaragua, which is the port city on the Atlantic Coast. Sara’s sister Flora moved to Bluefields after Flora’s three young daughters all had babies. Sara went to help deliver her grandnieces. I had the honor of naming the baby next to Sara in the image. She was born on July 27. One of best childhood friends growing up was born on the same day so a Karawalan baby born in Bluefields is named after her, Baby Audrey. I wish Sara could have delivered my baby.
Maribel's Braids
Maribel's Braids. Maribel is actually not related to Melvin and his family, well not that I know of. Maribel and her daughter Gina lived across the grass from me. Maribel could plait your hair tighter than anyone in town. Whenever I would leave Karawala, Maribel would offer to plait my hair so I could leave town with beautiful braids and always stay a Karawalan girl.
Girls and Dolls
We did have to leave town and after a year and a half on the beautiful Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua we were transferred to Altagracia a town in the middle of an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua in southern Nicaragua. It was devastating to leave Karawala but we quickly fell in love with Altagracia and her island.
Girls and Dolls was taken in Lake Nicaragua near the town of San Jose del Sur. The girls in the photograph were my students who lived at Los Quinchos, a home for exploited young women. After lunch, the girls would bathe in the lake and bathe their dolls. As an observer, I always felt the girls were regaining a lost innocence the tender way the cared for their dolls.
From a Nicaraguan island, once isolated from media to a New York Island, saturated with media, my images are now connected via Contemporarious.
