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Steven Holl. Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland

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Check out the Salon's website to see a couple of pieces from the collection I will be showing tonight, as well as those of other presenters.  20 slides/20 seconds each!  Sounds like a brutal format, a kind of speed dating with art, but I think I like it: it prevents preciousness from slipping into the presentation.  The time constraint has it's price too.. Didn't Mark Twain once complain about the 5 minutes he was given once to deliver a speech, saying that he'd need two weeks to prepare for it, while he could give a 2-hour lecture today! :)  

I am really excited about this event...., and I better practice my "5 minutes" now!  

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Sheryl Jaffe.  Installation in progress, Paper City Studios, Holyoke, 2011

 

Sheryl Jaffe.  Installation in progress, Paper City Studios, Holyoke, 2011

 

Sheryl Jaffe.  Installation in progress, Paper City Studios, Holyoke, 2011

 

Sheryl Jaffe.  Installation in progress, Paper City Studios, Holyoke, 2011

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I'd never asked myself this question before. But the theme and the title of an upcoming photography show - What Matters About Photography? - at the Vermont Center for Photography made me ponder.  Where do I even begin?  There are innumerable ways in which photography matters - to me.  This is what I wrote in a short essay that accompanied my submission for this annual juried exhibition, and that only begins the conversation for me: 

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, Albert Einstein once said.

 Photography allows me to dwell on, to capture, and to share with others what I see as the immeasurable and the mysterious in our lives - be that a child’s face as she relishes the feel of her fingers sinking in the warm fur of the cat’s belly;  or the stillness of time, void of space and sound, as I watch my husband quietly fight for his life; or the pattern of light, flowing outward through a tobacco barn’s open slats, like outstretched wings of a gigantic bird about to take off into the dark winter night; or the way the world suddenly  arranges itself, just this one time, just right here, in front of me...  I am reminded, time and again, in these plentiful moments of witnessing life’s mysteries, to remember life.  Memento Vita - paraphrasing the ageless wisdom of the Ancient Romans.

 I am very excited to announce that three of my photographs - Raiija and Runka, Accordionists, and an Untitled from 30 Days in Spring Series were accepted for the show.  You may already be familiar with the faces of Railija and Runka, and of the Accordionists, both of which were on display in Amherst in Northampton this past winter.  I haven't yet however shown any photographs from the 30 Days in Spring series.  These document Agus's quiet and willful fight with cancer last April, 2010.  I am both nervous and thrilled to have one of them on display in this upcoming show.  

Please come to the opening reception this Friday, April 1 in Brattleboro, VT.  See more information below.  And no, it is not an April fool's joke! :-)

THIS MONTH AT VCP...APRIL 2011... WHAT MATTERS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY- A JURIED EXHIBITION ...April 1-May 1, 2011  Nancy Weber, En El Campo-Mexico, archival digital print, 2011     Elsa Voelcker, Grampie Caning a Chair, silver gelatin print, 1970      Judy Unger-Clark, Three Kids on a Beach, hand colored silver gelatin composite print, 1991   An excerpt from an VCP newsletter:   In April 2011, the Vermont Center for Photography will present a juried exhibit titled, What Matters About Photography. We hope that by exploring what matters with images and writing we will get to some kind of understanding of photography's place in the world of ideas and art. What Matters About Photography will feature work by Elsa Voelcker, Susan Lirakis, Andrew Strattner, Paul Osborne & Catherine Davis, Corey Stein, Michael Stoudt, Andrew Hodgdon, Heidi Haner, Cheryl Willoughby, Liza Mindemann, Paula Sagerman, Donald David, Jerry Reed, Liz LaVorgna, Bernie Kubiak, Kathleen Carr, Suzanne Flynt, Judy Unger-Clark, Ellen Madden, Betsy Feick, John Nopper, Cynthia Hughes, Anita Licis-Ribak, Bill Arduser, Nancy Weber, Doug Frank, Brent Seabrook, Andrea Powell, and Tim Ellis.   An opening reception will be held Friday, April 1, 2011, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. during Brattleboro's Gallery Walk. The exhibit will be on view through May 1.   GET INVOLVED! Please post your thoughts and photographic examples about what you think matters about photography on our wordpress blog at http://vcpwhatmatters.wordpress.com/.   Most works featured in the What Matters About Photography exhibition are for sale.  Please contact the gallery manager at info@vcphoto.org or 802-251-6051 for more information.

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This afternoon, I will be giving a presentation on my personal design and photography work at Smith College as part of the spring lecture series, Daughters of Invention. I am thrilled to be in such an inspiring company! Last hours of preparation...

I have unearthed, after 13 years of it laying dormant, my Masters of Science thesis project on Architecture+Music. Still today, the subject is so relevant to me, and fresh!

Morton Feldman once said: I paint the canvas of time with colors of sound. John Cage may have added: ...and silence....

Daughters of Invention Poster.pdf Download this file

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Woman As Photographer Poster.pdf Download this file

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It will be 25 years this June since I left пос.Черский/the town of Cherskiy in northeast Russia where I lived through my adolescence, my first kiss, my first (and only) 'deadly' confrontation with my father, and many a dream, including a non-realisable dream of escape from home - not very original, being a product of teenage brain.

I am feeling a strong pull to go back and revisit (not so much the trials of adolescence!). The 25 years have added new lines to my face, and presumably to my brain.  Some of the topographic expressions of both may be attributed to the string of information I have been digesting, arriving in a continuous telegraph that started 25 years ago, after I left Cherskiy. The year was 1986, and the geyser of Glasnost had opened up the floodgates of information available to the wary but truth-hungry consumers. It's about the history of the place. In fact, it's about the history of the whole country, USSR then, and how its jagged edges cut up the life of my family, and all other nucleuses of that society (The USSR always proudly maintained that each family is a nucleus of society. And then, it would go on to explode this 'nucleus' from within).

I was telling about my new travel plans to a close friend recently, and she told me, oh it is going to be wonderful, have fun! I thought for a second, and said, uhm, well, I don't think so, and went to the book shelf to take down a behemoth of a tome, called GULAG. This is my very handy travel guide to the place I once called home.

I don't even know how does one get there these days. The transportation system in Russia today is as perplexing as it was during Soviet times. I did some research on the web, and found out that a company called Polar Airlines does fly small planes to Cherskiy. Their website has a map of all their travel routes, all originating in Yakutsk, the capital of Saha republic, and does include Cherskiy. I followed their link to the flight schedules and rates, and found no mention of Cherskiy there. This puzzling discrepancy may as well be a harbinger of things to come, shall I embark on this journey. I've got the bug now, and the only way of ridding myself of it is by obliging....

I will take liberty of blaming my new affliction on Ian Frazier, with his Travels in Siberia, a wonderfully engaging book, alive with characters, history, and humor, which I just finished reading. He took me back home, to Siberia, the easy way: a mere $20-or-so for my hard cover copy, on a warm living room sofa.

The 'hard way' would entail 24 hours of flying on at least 3 different planes, through 16 time zones, and eating dry kielbasa for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a duration of the trip. Did I mention the $2,500 I would be required to furbish to pay for the treatment of this delirium of mine?.... (I welcome suggestions on what health insurance might cover such a 'treatment'!) $2,500 is what it would take to come by the half-dosen airplane tickets I would need to procure, to get me to Cherskiy. Trust me, I would walk, except there are no roads that lead there.  Not in a reasonable season, anyway. (You can walk on the river ice roads, in winter.  But then, would you?...)  I would take a train. But thankfully, there were limits to just how far the great Soviet railway system, with its millions of free slave laborers, would reach. No railways anywhere near Chersky, aslo known as Nizhnie Kresty, one of Gulag's northernmost labor concentration camps, listed as Nr. 27 on some lists, absent altogether from most of Gulag camp maps.

This photograph from the archives of the Museum of Exile and Resistance in Kaunas, Lithuania, was taken in the early 1950s. It shows one of Gulag's gold-mining concentration camps on the Kolyma river in northeast Russia.

Google Maps tells me they could not calculate directions, nor the travel distance between Anchorage, Alaska, and the town of Cherskiy, Russia...

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After years of shooting, months of brewing, and hours of installation, today opened my new photography show at the Hosmer Art Gallery in Northampton. Here is a small preview, accompanied by my introduction to the show. Please come and enjoy! I hope to see many of you at the reception on Saturday, January 15th, from 2 to 4:30 p.m.

***************

When I am asked where I come from, I answer “Latvia”. More often than not, another question follows: where is Latvia? Perhaps it is because it is such a new country that its humble contours, shaped like a windblown dress, haven't yet been drawn on some of the world's maps. And yet, Latvia has been independent for 20 years now, and is part of NATO and the European Union. It has sent out its sons and daughters into the world, but your chances of running into one of them are quite slim: there are only 2 million of us.

The wind that blows 'the dress' arrives from the Baltic Sea, in Northeast Europe - half of Latvia's border is sculpted by its sandy coastline, pinned down by tall proud pine trees and sparingly sprinkled with amber, Latvia’s national stone. The wind is bone-chilling in the long gray winters, fresh and playful in the bright explosion of green-blue summers, with their long days and short nights. Before Latvia regained its independence from the USSR in 1990, this Baltic wind had for a long time been promising freedom, planting daring thoughts of escape into the young minds, and strengthening the resilience of those still left behind after the storms of revolutions and uprising, world wars and stalinist purges had swept through, and quieted down.

Like all European countries between Germany and Russia, Latvia was subject to politically motivated land disputes between the large neighboring empires, and Latvia’s people subjected to hundreds of years of foreign aggression, occupation, and displacement. The last of those years were marked by the forceful annexation of Latvia by the USSR, which lasted from 1940 until the singing revolution of 1990, and the massive deportations to Siberian labor camps following the annexation. Remarkably, Latvian identity, its language, the strong tradition of singing, and millions of songs (many of them forbidden during the soviet times), survived. Even after losing some of its most beautiful buildings to WWII bombings and to destructive Soviet nationalization policies, Latvia’s capital Rīga, perched on the river Daugava where it meets the Baltic Sea waters, remains a rich hub of European culture, complete with an ancient fortress, medieval cathedrals, and cobbled street labyrinths, with entire streets graced by architectural jewels of Art Nuovo and National Romanticism. 

But centuries of upheavals have also left the country bleeding. Latvia was the worst hit country in the world in the recent economic recession, its GDP shrinking more than 20%, and the unemployment rates going up from 5 to almost 20 percent in only 2 years. Life expectancy for men has gone down to 67 years, not least of it due to alcoholism. Last time I was in Latvia, in September of 2009, when I took most of these photographs, dozens of schools and hospitals were closing; salaries, pensions, and all types of government subsidies were being slashed; half-built buildings were standing abandoned. Latvia had entered into deep “austerity mode”.

These photographs are of the city of Rīga, and its ordinary people caught in ordinary situations. They are taken in-the-moment, each a spontaneous slice of time and place, as I was reacting to a certain situation or emotion. With these images I would like to convey the richness and the strength of my countrymen's spirit, as it transcends the time and place, aching under strain facing the unknown, and to show that loneliness can coexist with comradeship, agony with repose, vulnerability with strength, passion with nostalgia, doubt with lightness, and the mundane with the extraordinary.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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One of my photographic assemblies, Time Still No.3, is on view at Nacul Center Gallery at 592 Main St. The gallery is open on weekdays 9-4, and weekends 1-4. I hope to see you there!

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Shedding Light returns on 12-11-10! FOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY! 
What an auspicious date to relight the shed! If you missed it last year or wish to see it illuminated again please come by.

This lighting will mark the opening of an exhibit of photographs of last year's installation. Anita Līcis-Ribak, Charlotte Meryman, Donald David, Stephanie Oates, Terry Rooney and project's artist Erika Zekos will be among those showing their own views of the barn and light and landscape. In addition, exhibition's organizers Erika and Terry, will be showing the beautiful film about Shedding Light by Catherine Stryker of ACTV.

Opening Reception: Saturday, 12-11-10:
3 - 5 PM @ the Nacul Center Gallery (592 Main St., Amherst, MA)
6 -10 PM Relighting of Shedding Light @ Swartz Family Farm (11 Meadow St., Amherst, MA)

We hope that you'll join us!

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I am happy to announce that two of my photographs have just been published in two separate editions.  

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One of my photographs, City of Storm, from the Inaccessible Halves collection (photographs from New Mexico) will be auctioned, to benefit the Markham-Nathan Fund for social justice. 

Hope you can make it! 

"Savoy Heel and Toe"  by Richard Yarde

THE MARKHAM – NATHAN FUND is happy to invite you to our first annual benefit auction:

ART FOR ALL !!! 

Saturday,  October 2nd

The Northampton Center for the Arts

5:00 p.m. Doors open 

7:00 p.m. Auction begins

Vijay Prashad, Auctioneer

FOOD, DRINK, MUSIC, FUN!  BRING YOUR FRIENDS!

Classic rock with a latin twist -- Jose González/Criollo Clasico

Click here to see some of the art on offer:

http://www.markhamnathanfund.org/?page_id=88

We hope you can come to this exciting art auction.  Below is a list of artists whose work will be on the auction block.

Simone Alter-Muri, Anne Ayvaliotis, Leonard Baskin, Fred Becker, Olivia Bernard, Mary Bernstein, Edith Byron, Mary Ann Connelly, Eliza Cooney, Jack Coughlin, Christin Couture, Leonard Craig, Pam Crawford, Sue Curran, Louise T. Currin, Helena Dooley, Kit Fairchild, Hector Figarella, Rachel Folsom, Elliot Fratkin, Adele Gilbert, Greg Gillespie, Ellen Grobman, Isabella Halsted, Constance Hamilton, Gillian Haven, Laura Holland, Keith Hollingsworth,  Margaret Holt, Alan Hurwitz, Judith Inglese, Barbara Johnson, Wolf Kahn, Lorna Kepes, Frances Kidder, Chris Labich, Frank Landlen, Julie Lapping, Anita Licis, Louis Lionni, Suzanne LoManto, Jane Lund, Robert Markey, Joyce Miller, Sigrid Miller-Pollin, Matthew Mitchell, Lourdes Morales, Barry Moser, Claudine Mussuto, William Myers, Dean Nimmer, Steve Petegorsky, Lynn Peterfreund, Scott Prior, Lorna Ritz, Deborah Rubin, Vito Sammartano, Ann Slocum, Gary Michael Tartakov, Rene Theberge, Gregory Thorpe, Diane Travis, Janet Walerstein Winston, Marcia Wise, Wei Ming Wang, Richard Yarde and others

"Public Building" by Fred Becker

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Amherst Biennial Invite Email (dragged).pdf Download this file

Amherst Biennial Invite Email (dragged).pdf Download this file

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