Focus Newsletter
Category: Focus Newsletter
Gabler-Jackson
“Ice-elation and Lumine-scent“
An Exhibit Featuring the Photography of
Franka Gabler and Caroline Jackson
December 2, 2021 – January 2, 2022
ArtHop Artist Reception: Thursday, December 4, 5PM to 8PM
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“Ice-elation” Franka’s ‘Ice-elation’ project began with the 2020 pandemic and the resultant closure of National and State Parks, followed by a period of sheltering in place and self-isolation. The project helped her to overcome the initial creative block caused by the pandemic. One day, during lockdown, she froze an orchid stem and loved the effect – delicate textures of cracked ice encasing the flowers, revealing parts of them and concealing others. This inspired her to start exploring the forms and patterns of different flowers encased in ice. She photographed the ice blocks with flowers on the light box in her studio. Backlighting further revealed subtle textures of ice and flowers, their translucency and luminance, exposing their transient nature and fragility. The effect seemed similar to photographing landscapes in fog – her favorite photography subject: subtle, mysterious, unstable, and unpredictable. And there it happened…her inspiration came back! The ‘Ice-elation’ project sparked her creativity and helped her to refocus her thoughts from the doom and gloom of the initial days of the pandemic to something beautiful and uplifting. Biography: Award-winning photographer and scientist, Franka M. Gabler, developed a fascination, admiration, and respect for nature early in her lifetime. Soon after moving to California in 1997, she experienced her first wilderness backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Ever since that time, she has been photographing the magnificence of the high-country mountains and the California landscape. Her photographs are evocative – the light and atmosphere evident in her photographs often result in sentimental impact and ethereal feeling. She strives to capture the mood and the essence of the place she photographs. Franka’s photographs have won many awards, including the most recent – a 1st place award for the ‘Intimate and Abstract’ category of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. Her photographs are published in several books and she has been featured in several photography magazines. Franka has been invited to speak at several photography conferences. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibits and is represented in private collections throughout the United States and abroad. She is affiliated with Stellar Gallery in Oakhurst, Spectrum Art Gallery in Fresno, Ridgeline Gallery in Mariposa, Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, and Circle Gallery in Madera, CA. Franka lives in the Sierra foothills, in the small mountain town of Coarsegold, not far from Yosemite National Park. You can learn more about her work at: www.frankagabler.com. |
“Lumine-scent Caroline V. Jackson bought her first camera 10 years ago, and has seldom set it aside. She never settled on a particular genre, and normally takes a mindfulness approach to creating images. Her photographs are not made with intention – such as documentary work – but on free flowing feeling. Always drawn to the range of human experience, and usually a “darker,” lonely or “edgy” mood, her images feature themes of alienation, separation and exclusion and can encompass street scenes, lonely desert landscape, crumbling structures – scenes that convey isolation and being cast aside. Being drawn to the outlier segments of society, her pictures are usually not “pretty.” The goal is always to have the viewer pause, feel, listen and question their relationship to a subject or an idea. The pandemic came, with an about face. Its isolation and travel bans foreclosed most photographic opportunities. But the stay at home orders, along with available time, and a refusal to put down her camera, led to a cloistered genre of photography created with intention and planning – lightbox floral photography. The light coming through her images gives a different take on a familiar subject. The light brings out the beauty of floral arrangement, a twist to her usual style. Through intention, Lumine-Scent conveys beauty, softness, organization, calmness, symmetry – qualities lost to the pandemic chaos. Each featured Lumine-Scent piece begins with a lightbox and fresh flowers selected for potential translucency. An arrangement is made atop the lightbox, with attention paid to symmetry or lack thereof, openness, movement. Each piece is then crafted by taking 4-8 shots of the floral arrangement at varying exposures. The 4-8 exposures are then hand blended in post with layer masks and brushes to bring forth delicate highlights and contrast. The final image is placed on a background or texture complementing the color palette of the individual arrangement. This technique makes the final image appear more as a painting than a photograph. Biography: Caroline V. Jackson is an attorney from the San Francisco Bay Area, now making Fresno her home. This structured approach to creating images – with intention and planning – syncs well with legal training. She is affiliated with Spectrum Gallery in Fresno. Her work has been shown at various exhibitions in the Central Valley. |
Metonymies-Sojourn
“Metonymies – Sojourn”
An Exhibit Featuring the Photography of
John Moses and Joshua Moulton
November 4 – November 28, 2021
ArtHop Reception: Thursday, November 4, from 4PM to 8PM
“Metonymies” Metonymy is the imaginative process that uses a part to represent the whole. Proximity, or contiguity, is basic to how it operates in figures of speech. But more than just a literary device in poetry, metonymy is part of everyday communication, a way of understanding and speaking about the world—for example, “hand” for helper, “Hollywood” for American movies, “Rothko” for the artist’s paintings. But what does that have to do with photography, you may be wondering. Linguists and artists have long extended the concept to the visual arts—from painting to the cinema. Roman Jakobson contrasted the metaphors of surrealist art to the metonymies of Cubism. Sergei Eisenstein theorized about the metonymies inherent in distinct categories of cinematic montage, the relations of shot to shot. Photographers constantly make judgments involving contiguity. Whether in the viewfinder or the darkroom, they reveal what is in the frame and what is beyond it. Sometimes the subject is complete and surrounded by empty space—a still life, a building, an object from nature. Just as often, the subject is only implied by the part shown, sometimes so abstracted as to be ambiguous even in its concreteness. The images of “Metonymies” play with these possibilities. They imply what is not there as much as present what is. Some are abstract, minimalist images—a light shining on a reel of film; a detail from a 6-foot bronze; a hoist drum from a Cornwall mine. Others are more recognizable parts of some whole—a building façade, a tree within a forest, components of a steam engine. And others are of images connected to concepts like flag for country. Each illustrates how metonymy is as basic to visual language as it is to verbal. Functionally, metaphors are the opposite of metonymy, based on imagined similarities rather than recognized proximity. Yet the two creative processes often operate together. A flag connects to country but also evokes ideas about honor or dishonor. The closeup of a sunflower’s center may epitomize the beauty of the flower but can also remind us of Van Gogh’s fields of yellow or a dreamlike scene from a Busby Berkeley musical. So, while I present the images in this exhibit as examples of metonymy, I invite you to imagine the metaphoric possibilities as well. |
Sojourn Hiking through the Icelandic mountains on a deary, late afternoon and coming over the rise of the hilltop, I finally get my first glimpse at the Geldingadalir volcano and my heart skips a beat. As I draw nearer to the eruption I feel heat from the lava warming my face just like I’m sitting in front of a campfire even though the source is thousands of feet away. The sound of stones grinding upon each other as the hardened uppermost layer of molten rock flows past in a river of fire fills my skull. And then comes the eruption-a magnificent, glorious and violent explosion of lava directly from the heart of the volcano high into the sky as more pours down the side. This could be Mordor. At my core I love fantasy. I love fantasy books, movies, games, and the wide-sweeping vistas that detail the epic quests and scenes that drive these stories. In essence that is what Sojourn is to me. Sojourn features photos from around the world that share that common sense of adventure and wonder. From the Martian landscapes of the Tron a Pinnacles to the abundant waterfalls of Iceland, each location weaves a story for my camera to capture. California is home to many captivating and varied landscapes and I take every opportunity to explore my native state, but nothing excites me more than the call of an exotic land. My latest sojourn to Iceland, the land of ice and fire, did not disappoint. There are waterfalls everywhere you look, erupting volcanos, glacier bays and epic canyons that transport you to a time before humans roamed the earth. In this collection I’ve gathered moments from Iceland, California and afar to bring viewers along with me on my adventures. So, come sojourn with me through these epic landscapes and maybe, if you’re feeling up to it, you can hum along to the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack like I always find myself doing when I’m out there. |