Articles tagged with: Photography

  • Brock photographers snap up art show awards

    Danny Custodio collaborated with his father to create compositions exploring tar’s organic forms and textures.

    (Source: The Brock News | Wednesday Dec. 6, 2017 by Alison Innes)

    Two Brock photographers were recently honoured for their ability to capture compelling imagery.

    Visual Arts student Denise Apostolatos and Administrative Assistant Danny Custodio, from the Rodman Hall Art Centre, both won awards at RMG Exposed: Out of this World, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery art show and charity auction held Nov. 25.

    Oil and Vinegar by Visual Arts student Denise Apostolatos, received first place in the youth category at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery Exposed: Out of this World annual photography show and auction.

    Oil and Vinegar by Visual Arts student Denise Apostolatos

    Oil and Vinegar by Visual Arts student Denise Apostolatos, received first place in the youth category at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery Exposed: Out of this World annual photography show and auction.

    Apostolatos’ work, Oil and Vinegar, won first place in the youth category from a shortlist of 40 works from across North America. 

    She says it was “truly an honour” to be named the winner of the youth category, and to receive two consecutive acceptances to participate in RMG Exposed.

    “As an undergraduate student, these opportunities are unique in that they provide a professional outlet to gain recognition and network in a larger context,” she says.

    Apostolatos credits the artistic and professional guidance she receives in the Visual Arts program for fostering her development as a creative professional.

    “As an undergraduate artist, it is important to see her work outside of the classroom and in the professional art community,” says Visual Arts Professor and Department Chair Donna Szoke. “We are thrilled to see Denise’s work being celebrated.”

    The award is also a means to recognize the “talent being produced here in Niagara in our Visual Arts program at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts,” she says.

    Rodman Hall’s Danny Custodio took first place in the Conceptual/Non-Representational category at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s Exposed: Out of this World annual photography show and auction. He is pictured with award sponsor Mason Bennett of Johncox professional Corporation.

    Danny Custodio's artwork of a tv screen on wall with eyes on screen, while a man in a security shirt kneels with hands behand his back head against the wall

    Rodman Hall’s Danny Custodio took first place in the Conceptual/Non-Representational category at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s Exposed: Out of this World annual photography show and auction. He is pictured with award sponsor Mason Bennett of Johncox professional Corporation.

    Custodio received the Conceptual/Non-Representational Prize for his image Tar, which explores themes of blue-collar labour.

    “Tar is a commonly used substance in roofing, the profession my father worked for 45 years,” says Custodio, who collaborated with his father to create compositions exploring tar’s organic forms and textures.

    RMG Exposed: Out of this World brings together artists, collectors and curators to celebrate digital photography and support free arts programming for kids and families. The event, now in its eighth year, includes both live and silent auctions of images carefully selected from 466 submissions.

    The event is designed to recognize contemporary photographers and draws artist submissions from across Canada and the United States.

    The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is a public art museum in Oshawa and features a collection of over 4,500 works including Canadian contemporary art and photography.

    To view this year’s images, visit the RMG Exposed website.

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    Categories: Announcements, Current Students, Exhibitions, In the Media, News

  • Visual Arts professor releases new book on photography

    Appropriated photographs book cover(Source: The Brock NewsFriday, December 9, 2016 | by Alison Innes)

    Professor Linda Steer has been fascinated with photography since she was a little girl looking at her grandmother’s photo albums. Her interest in photography and surrealism has now led to the recent publication of her book, Appropriated Photographs in French Surrealist Periodicals, 1924-1939.

    Steer says understanding the appropriation and recirculation of images is an important part of our media-rich culture.

    “Research on photography is becoming increasingly important as we live more and more of our lives through visual images,” she says.

    Memes are one modern example of how the meaning of an image changes.

    “They are typically photographic images that have been appropriated and altered through the addition of text or juxtaposition with other images. They circulate on social media. That process of adding text and re-circulating changes their meanings,” Steer says.

    The surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s were doing a similar thing in their magazines: taking existing images and juxtaposing them with other images or text. In this process, surrealists turned established images, such as medical images or crime-scene photographs, into works of art with very different meanings from the original photographs.

    It’s important to our image-laden lives to understand this process and what it means, says Steer.

    Her book is structured around four case studies and is the first of its kind on this topic.

    Since art history is an interdisciplinary field, Steer’s analysis engages with histories of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, ethnography, anthropology, literature and poetry, criminology, forensics, politics, religion, and popular culture in late 19th and early 20th century France and beyond.

    While the book is for an academic audience, Steer hopes those interested in photography and art will also find it appealing.

    “I hope that my book gives readers a new way of thinking about the complex relationships between surrealism and photography, and that it allows readers to understand, in a more general way, how photographs work and how they come to have meaning,” Steer concludes.

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    Categories: Faculty & Instructors, News

  • Visual Arts students build camera obscura at Walker School

    (Source: The Brock NewsWednesday, November 23, 2016 | by Alison Innes. Photo caption: Brock Visual Arts students work to build a camera obscura in front of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.)

    Constructing a large outdoor camera has given Brock Visual Arts students a freeze frame of photography techniques of the past.

    As part of the Walker Cultural Leader Series, 40 students from Prof. Amy Friend’s Camera and Darkroom Process Photography course and Candace Bodanski’s Baroque Art and Architecture course worked to build a three metre by three metre camera obscura in front of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts in downtown St. Catharines

    The camera obscura gave students an opportunity to experience an early form of photograph making.

    “Their interactions with the structure coerced new methodologies and much trial and error to achieve a successful photograph,” Friend says.

    After working with New York artist Liz Sales and Friend to build the camera, the students used it for about a month to produce photographs.

    The result is a new exhibit at the downtown Brock opening Thursday, Nov. 24.

    The term camera obscura was coined in the early 17th century and means “a darkened room.” The device works on similar principles to a pinhole camera. A dark room or tent with a small hole in one side allows light to pass into the darkened space and create an image of an object. This image can be captured on photographic paper or by drawing.

    Making the structure light-tight was a challenge, requiring students to hand stitch the black-out material directly onto the structure so wind couldn’t lift the fabric and allow light to leak in and interfere with the exposure of the silver gelatin paper during production.

    Friend said that she witnessed some hesitancy with the new structure at first, as it disrupts modern understanding of what a photographic capture is.

    “As a practitioner,” she said, “I love that reaching into the vaults of history reveals new ways of seeing and thinking. Students pushed their experiments with impressive results.”

    Other Brock Visual Arts classes also interacted with the camera obscura while two high school classes visited the project and attended a workshop with Sales and Friend in which they engaged with the camera and darkroom facilities to produce photographs.

    In Light and Darkness: A Camera Obscura Project with Artist Liz Sales and Brock Visual Arts Students runs until Dec. 9 in the MIWSFPA Art Gallery, and also features work from Sales’ own camera obscura series The Weather Inside. An opening reception and artist talk by Sales will be held Thursday, Nov. 24 from 6-7 p.m. in MW151 at the downtown campus.

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    Categories: In the Media, News

  • Visa Photography Instructor Amy Friend mounts exhibition.

    image_559Photography Professor Amy Friend presents Eternal Light at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto.

    November 2 – 30, 2016
    The Gallery at the J
    Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre
    750 Spadina Ave. (at Bloor), Toronto Ontario

    In Jewish tradition the death of a loved one is commemorated by lighting a yahrzeit candle, often with a prayer beginning with a passage from Proverbs, “. . . the lamp of the Eternal is the soul of humanity . . .” For most Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and so many who died before, there is no surviving family to observe this ritual. It therefore falls to future generations. For a visual interpretation of the theme Future of Memory, Neuberger HEW commissioned artist Amy Friend. Exploring the notion of light, Friend used archival photographs of European Jewry before the Shoah from UJA Federation’s Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre. She carefully perforated each reproduced photo and shined light though the small openings, bringing new light into the image and recreating it as a unique work of art; a poignant and eternal tribute to life, love, and loss.

    Amy Friend is a Canadian Artist and Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Brock University. Friend has exhibited nationally and internationally, exploring issues related to history, memory, personal archives and phenomenology. She works with the medium of photography pushing its anticipated boundaries through installation and material experimentation. Recent exhibitions include Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life (Rodman Hall, Canada), Heaven on Earth at the DongGang Museum of Photography (South Korea) and at the GetxoPhoto Festival (Spain). She has been selected as a top 50 photographer by Critical Mass International Photography Competition for three years running. Amy Friend is represented by C3 Arts.

    Exhibit Curated by Mira Goldfarb. Generously co-sponsored by Sally & Mark Zigler in honour of their parents, Fanny & Bernard Dov Laufer and Etty & Salo Zigler.

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  • Visa LTA Instructor exhibits in Poland.

    amy-friend_dare_alla_luce_1-3LTA Photography Instructor Amy Friend will be exhibiting work in Października Poland as part of the Vintage Photography Festival October 7 to 23. For more information, please click HERE.

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  • Brock University Visual Arts Assistant Professor’s work exhibited internationally

    web_01-amyfriend_01amyfriend_march-28_42-17-yearsBrock University Visual Arts assistant professor Amy Friend’s work is featured in the Main Exhibition at the Donggang International Photo Festival in South Korea.

    Exhibition Overview:
    A total of 14 photographers around the world are participating in this exhibition, which will revolve around the theme of ‘Heaven on Earth’.

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  • Visa Instructor Amy Friend part of upcoming group exhibition.

    medium-colincarneycheckedoutPhotography Instructor Amy Friend is part of an upcoming group exhibition titled Chronologues.

    Museum London
    May 7 – August 21, 2016

    For more information on this event please click HERE.

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  • Visa Instructor Amy Friend announces exhibitions.

    friend_a-04Photography Instructor Amy Friend is part of the following events:

    CRITICAL MASS

    Amy Friend is one of fifty photographers included in Critical Mass. The selection is based on a juried portfolio process by 200 curators and professionals in the art field. For more information on this click HERE.

     

    FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE FOTOGRAFÍA GUATEPHOTO 2015

    Amy’s work is featured in the group exhibition titled, Seeing Connections, in Antigua, Guatemala, curated by Dr. Rebecca Senf (Curator of Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum and Creative Center for Photography, USA).

    Amy will also present the recently published monograph from the same series at the Photobook exhibition in the Guatemala Photo Festival, and she will also participate as a panelist at the Museo Arte de Guatemala in Guatemela City on November 21, 2015. This panel discussion will focus on New Initiatives and Platforms for Photography on an international scale.

    For more information click HERE.

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  • Cogeco coverage of Student Photography Exhibit

    The opening reception of VISA’s student photography exhibition “Who’s Afraid of the Darkroom” was recently covered by TV Cogeco. Click here to view the piece, including an interview with instructor Amy Friend.

    “Who’s Afraid of the Darkroom” can be found in the Sean O’Sullivan Lobby until January 30th.

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    Categories: Events, Exhibitions, In the Media, News