Memory, Identity, and Place, an exhibition of photo-based works and painting, will open on March 12 at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island. The public is invited to an opening reception from 6-8 pm on Saturday, March 12. A gallery talk by three of the exhibiting artists will take place at 4 pm before the opening reception.

The works by the seven artists in this exhibition explore the complex relationship between memory, identity and place. Place holds memory and defines who we are. We each have memories that relate to or are invoked by a certain place. We share memories of a common social history that connects us to community. The connection to place and its change or loss affects us in profound ways.

Both photography and painting have been used to depict idealized, utopian, or exotic places - fictionalized images that reflect or influence the collective imagination of the times. The artists in this exhibition examine these cultural notions of place by deconstructing and re-contextualizing traditional photographic and painterly modes of portraying the landscape, family, and community.

Luke Buffenmyer lives in Syracuse, New York and teaches at Onandaga Community College. He received his MFA from Syracuse University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Buffenmeyer photographs places he is drawn to, rather than the exotic locales preferred by the 19th Century landscape photographers he references. Choice of format (an 8 x 10 negative), vignetting, toning and manipulation of the negative are techniques he uses to map his personal narrative onto the genre of landscape photography. Buffenmeyer says of his work, “These images are about context, illusion, reality, nostalgia and a sense of place. Through selection, manipulation and thought they are an attempt to make the place viewed my own. They reference the grand 19th Century landscape and question the premise of authorship and originality.”

Nancy Dudley is a photographer and Adjunct Professor of Art at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. Dudley is interested in the history contained in the coastal New England landscape surrounding her home in Essex, Massachusetts. Glacial activity combined with human and animal use, have created a site whose appearance perpetually fluctuates between the cultivated and untamed. Dudley’s silver gelatin prints of her garden record her participation in this continuum.

Susan E. Evans , who also teaches at Onandaga Community College, will exhibit pieces from two recent series, “Views” and “See America”. In “Views”, photographs of words in white letters on a black background describe panoramic scenes. The absence of images invokes our own memories, assumptions, and imagination about these places and our relationship to them.

Adam Eckstrom is an MFA candidate in the Department of Painting at The Rhode Island School of Design. In our rapidly changing environment, natural and architectural touchstones that serve as repositories of cultural history are frequently removed from view. The result is a collective and personal amnesia addressed by Eckstrom is his paintings. He states, “I use domestic objects and architecture to create a narrative that speaks about my own experiences as well as comments on the current state of affairs. The architecture and objects are often stand -ins for actors in a drama about communication and memory breakdown.”

Penelope Manzella resides in Barrington, Rhode Island and received her BFA from the Columbia University School of Painting and Sculpture. She will show a selection of four paintings from a series on water towers, which she identifies as “industrial sculpture”. The series was inspired by the water tower photographs of the German photography duo Bernd and Hilla Becher. Manzella has taken the Bechers’ towers and situated them within an imaginary, idealized painted landscape. Her ‘picture of a picture” strategy emphasizes the towers’ iconic quality.

Photographer Olivia McCullough teaches at Northeastern University in Boston and Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. McCullough’s series of cyanotypes , titled “Orleton Farm” incorporates material such as letters, checks and photographs found on her grandparents’ abandoned Kentucky farm. The work is elegiac to her own memories of the place, her deceased grandparents, and a vanished way of life.

Shaun Wilson recently received his Phd from the University of Tasmania and is a lecturer in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Wilson uses film as a means of articulating the themes of memory, identity and place. By deconstructing family home movies, the videos he creates function as a filmic blank slate onto which one may project or reflect on one’s personal familial narrative.

This program is sponsored in part by The Rhode Island State Council On The Arts, The Friends of Hera, and The Hera Educational Foundation. Programs and exhibitions are free and open to the public. Hera is handicap accessible. Free parking is available.

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