The annual student show at The Framemaker shines a light on young photographers.
The Framemaker frame shop and gallery in Clarksville is currently offering passersby a chance to peer into the future of Middle Tennessee’s art scene and catch a glimpse of what’s to come from a group of five young photographers at Austin Peay State University. The Framemaker hosts an annual show of student photos and this year’s exhibit – “Foresight” – finds Rian Barger, Amanda Flowers, Jon Chisholm, Kathryn Griffin, and Synthia Clark addressing both visual and psychological themes.
Rian Barger’s contribution to the show includes several close-ups of eyeballs staring into the lens of the camera. The artist culled her collection from “over a thousand photos of eyes.” Her five photos make a statement about the voyeurism that is intrinsic to photography while commenting on the gaze of the viewer. Synthia Clark’s photo montages respond to the Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem “We Wear the Mask,” juxtaposing photos of professional performers alongside Facebook pics of her friends “performing” for the camera.
Amanda Flowers included a series of photos she took of a friend’s father who was suffering with fibrosis of the liver. Rather than being repulsed by his condition, in her statement Flowers’ confesses to finding something beautiful in the man’s decaying body, and her small suite of photographs constitute a study of the human form presented as a ravished landscape. By not showing the man’s face, Flowers refuses to let her images slip into the category of portraiture, creating instead an almost abstract series of lines, shapes and forms consisting of protruding bones, blemished skin and animal tattoos. An intense and painful observation, Flowers manages to bring beauty to blossom amidst these fleurs du mal.
Jon Chisholm’s “Brutal Suppression” series is strikingly timely given the recent web and print images of police attacking the peaceful participants at the various Occupy Wall Street protests. Excited and cinematic, Chisholm’s eerie, spectral suppressors are dark figures in dark shadows on unknown streets. They could be anywhere. They might be everywhere. The images have been double exposed or perhaps the photographer has simply laid two images on top of one another as they all appear to have been subjected to some heavy digital processing. Chisholm does a nice job of pairing contemporary aesthetics to contemporary anxieties and we’d love to see him hook up with a writer who could make use of these images as illustrations in a graphic novel.
Kathryn Griffin shows promise as a snapper of poignant portraits in a series of shots that documents the faces – and therefore the stories – of homeless folks. “They all have a story,” she explains in her statement. “My work as a photographer has always been about things people don’t notice.” Or, in this case, the people that most people try not to notice. Griffin’s simple, straight-forward approach is very effective, revealing the resonant lives of this overlooked population in the stories that define and distort their bemused, battered and serene-seeming expressions.
“Foresight” at The Framemaker, located downtown Clarksville, is on view through Nov. 30.
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