New Works Members Exhibition

New Works Members Exhibition

FEBRUARY 1 to MARCH 31, 2024
Art Hop Receptions & Meet the Artists
FEBRUARY 1 & MARCH 7, 2024 • 4PM to 8PM

Spectrum was the name chosen 43 years ago by our founders to represent an inclusive and broad range of approaches, content, and form. We have strived to live up to this community-oriented mission through teamwork and honoring
photographic arts.

Once a year our members assemble a group display of works that occupies our whole exhibition space. For this show, each member has chosen their last produced favorites to give the viewer a glimpse of the kinds of projects that represent their latest passions or ideas.

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Queerness: Past and Present by Gailan Sabin Gray

 

Queerness: Past and Present by Gailan Sabin Gray

Exhibit: January 4 to January 28, 2024
Art Hop Reception: January 4, 2024 • 4PM to 8PM 
Workshop: Polaroid Manipulation January 6, 2024 • 11AM
 

Over the past couple of years, I have been creating images around the idea of Queer Modernity. Upon making my images I discovered more about queer history, more specifically queer art history. For some people, the idea of queerness is a modern or new age way of thinking, but, our identities have been around for centuries, going all the way back to 334 B.C. when Hephaestion, long believed to be Alexander the Great’s boyfriend had sent letters to Alexander’s mother telling her to stop quarreling with him. As the love he had for her son was insurmountable. We have tons of documentation that support the notion that queerness is not a new age concept. Rather, we have always been here, just hiding in plain sight. It is only now, in the present day, that we see a rampant exposure of new queer identities emerging because we feel more comfortable expressing ourselves openly.

For Queerness: Past and Present I focused on the polaroid process. The polaroid process results in a one-of-a-kind image that can never truly be replicated. A visual interpretation of the queer experience. Each individual has a one-of-a-kind experience coming to terms with who they are and ultimately finding ways to celebrate themselves in their fullest capacity. I chose to photograph my subjects with a softer focus to take a more painterly approach to the image making process. Mostly in reference to the art historical context that I have been consumed by for a few years. Within this exhibition, I have made sure to highlight specific queer coding that has been present in art history for centuries: the use of florals, peacock feathers, and sequins, all play a special role in the queer coding that has been present for centuries. 

Within the context of the “Queer Timeline” we queer folk must go through an extra hurdle in our lives. The average human experience in this timeline is: being born, growing up, finishing high school, going to college, joining the workforce, getting married, buying a house, and starting a family. However, with queer people, we have an extra step in our “Queer Timeline;” somewhere in there, we must come to terms with ourselves, which tends to put us ‘off track’ by a couple of years in relation to our heterosexual counterparts. An idea that got me thinking about how to represent queerness and not just rely on the hypersexuality that you’ll see when doing a rough hashtag search on Instagram of #queerart. Queerness is not just made for specific people, it is meant to be celebrated by everyone who has found themselves as an outsider looking in.

Queerness: Past and Present is my love letter to queerness and how diversified this notion is. I would like to thank my participants who openly shared themselves with my practice and embraced their own identities within this notion. I would also like to pay special homage to the queer elders who have paved the way for us queer folk to be so open and willing to love one another so openly and emphatically. It is because of them that we can exist. We no longer have to hide our queerness in coded symbols. I would also like to thank my husband, Cody Bates, for embracing my artistic practice and for his constant support.

I will also be offering a Polaroid Manipulation workshop on January 6, 2024, at 11:00AM. I have a few polaroid cameras available and will offer my expertise in the following techniques: polaroid emulsion lifts, film manipulation, and compositional techniques with polaroid film. Spacing is limited to 8 persons and the cost is $50 per person (to cover the price of the film), please contact gailangray@gmail.com to RSVP for the workshop.

Candle with Gailan's images available to purchase during exhibition.

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Sanctuary by William Neill

 

Sanctuary by William Neill

Exhibit: December 7 to December 31, 2023
Art Hop Reception: December 7, 2023 – 4PM to 8PM 
Artist Presentation, Reception & Book Signing: 
December 16, 2023 – 1 to 5PM
 
Giant Sequoias, Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park, California 2007 by William Neill
We welcome our 2023 Distinguished Guest Artist, nationally renowned, William Neill  to Fresno with his exhibition, Sanctuary.
 
William Neill, a resident of the Yosemite National Park area since 1977, is a landscape photographer concerned with conveying the deep, spiritual beauty he sees and feels in Nature. Neill’s award-winning photography has been widely published in books, magazines, calendars, and posters, and his limited-edition prints have been collected and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Vernon Collection, and The Polaroid Collection. Neill received a BA degree in Environmental Conservation at the University of Colorado. In 1995, Neill received the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for conservation photography.

Neill’s assignment and published credits include National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History, National Wildlife, Conde Nast Traveler, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Wilderness, Sunset, Sierra and Outside magazines. For 26 years, he wrote 150 essays for his column, On Landscape, in Outdoor Photographer magazine. Feature articles about his work have appeared in Life, Camera and Darkroom, Outdoor Photographer and Communication Arts, from whom he has also received five Awards of Excellence. 

His work was chosen to illustrate two special edition books published by The Nature Company, Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder and John Fowles The Tree. His photographs were also published in a three-book series on the science of natural processes in collaboration with the Exploratorium Museum of San Francisco: By Nature’s Design (Exploratorium / Chronicle Books, 1993), The Color of Nature (Exploratorium/Chronicle Books, 1996) and Traces of Time (Chronicle Books/Exploratorium, Fall 2000). A portfolio of his Yosemite photographs has been published entitled Yosemite: The Promise of Wildness (Yosemite Association, 1994) for which he received The Director’s Award from the National Park Service. A monograph of his landscape photography entitled Landscapes of the Spirit (Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown, 1997) relates his beliefs in the healing power of nature. Neill’s book, William Neill–Photographer, A Retrospective (Triplekite Publishing, 2017) is a collection of his photographs taken over the past forty years. His most recent books are Light on the Landscape (Rocky Nook, 2020), a collection of essays and images from his On Landscape column for Outdoor Photographer magazine and The Photographer’s Portfolio Development Workshop. Yosemite: Sanctuary in Stone, a personal collection of photographs made over 46 years, will be published in Fall 2023.

Half Dome and Elm Tree, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California 1990 by William Neill

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

In the Blink of an Eye by Michelle Ricci-Koch

 

In the Blink of an Eye: A Collection of Portraits & Florals by Michelle Ricci-Koch

Exhibit: November 2 to December 3, 2023
Art Hop Reception: November 2, 2023 – 5PM to 8PM
 
'Bride' by Michelle Ricci-Koch

I am a storyteller; my curiosity leads me to ask a lot of questions. My parents
mistakenly took it as sass but my lively imagination genuinely needed to connect the dots. I found that connection when I picked up the camera and immersed myself in an art community. An artistic journey spanning decades, my passion for photography ignited in the late 80’s with the discovery of the wet darkroom. Witnessing the evolution from film to digital, I’ve embraced the ever-changing landscape of technology while preserving the timeless essence of capturing moments.

My current exhibition showcases a delicate dance between the past and present. Through the lens of film, I capture the essence of florals, weaving in digital processes to enhance their innate beauty. My portraits embody the newer technology but are created with genuine human connection on a personal level.

Growth, life, erosion and age are all beautiful when viewed as a moment that will never be the same. Time never stops, we never get that minute back. An event, a portrait and the changing landscape can only be captured that second, whether it be seen with our eyes, or captured with a camera. As we age our mind may not be the keeper of memories anymore, but a photograph! A photograph lives on from generation to generation revealing history, memories and emotion.

Join me on this visual odyssey, where each photograph not only tells a story but
also invites you to join in the celebration of my life’s connections.

Making my home in Clovis, I share my life with a husband of 34 years, a daughter, three felines and a loyal canine companion. Beyond the lens, I am a passionate gardener, channeling my love for nature’s wonders into both my artistic and personal pursuits.
 
Michelle will be giving a Friday Photography Live talk on the importance of Portraits, on December 1st, at 7:00 pm at the Spectrum Art Gallery.
 
'The Gift' by Michelle Ricci-Koch

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Street View by Larry Cusick

 

Street View by Larry Cusick

Exhibit: October 5 to October 29, 2023
Art Hop Reception: October 5, 2023 – 5PM to 8PM
 

The street Is a landscape. But it is a landscape unique to the urban environment. As I walk with my camera, I see an unintended art-scape of concrete structures, metal objects, and people, all interacting randomly, and yet not randomly. Conversations echo off of walls, people hurry to cross a street, deep shadows slice through the air, closed doorways stand guard against entry, or street vendors in a topsy-turvy crowded sidewalk do their best to attract attention. There are stories unfolding every day on the streets. I try to understand what stories are being told. A photographic image can work for me if it triggers a mental narrative. 

An image could also work for me if it is an abstraction with no apparent story. But always, the photograph must be arresting. It could be a reflected street scene whose geometry is paradoxical, or highly symmetric. It could be a railroad crossing in the rain or an isolated small restaurant on a lonely street. These are everyday images. I like to take pictures of them.

There is beauty in the street, and my aspiration is to show that through my photography. And by beauty, I might not mean say, a flower or a majestic mountain. There is beauty in the geometrical patterns of the front face of a public building, the thoughtful gaze of a person waiting for something, the unexpected juxtaposition of someone walking by a piece of street art, or the textures of aged dilapidated structures whose purpose is long forgotten.

The photographs I am presenting fall into several categories. They include street photography, candid portraits, architecture, urban exploration, abstract reflective patterns, the so-called new topographics, and others that I may not even have thought of. I love taking pictures on the street. I hope you like them.

About the Artist
My interest in photography started when I took a photojournalism course in college. I was struck by how a story could be told through still images. Ever since then, I have been struck by the power of photography. After college came graduate school and a career and a family to raise, so photography took a back seat, mainly family snapshots. After retiring from higher education, I took up birding with my wife. I was immediately drawn to the challenge of bird photography. After a few years, I started to explore other types of photography. The one genre that I found most interesting was street photography, which in many ways I found similar to bird photography. Today I do both.
 
The artist, Larry Cusick, will be hosting Friday Photography Live at Spectrum Gallery on October 20th at 7PM. Please join us to learn more about the images and his process.
 

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Group Exhibition by Ed Gillum & Jesse Merrell & Travis Rockett

 

Perspectives: Point of View by Edward Gillum

Captive Isolation by Jesse Merrell

Remnants of the Past by Travis Rockett

Exhibit: September 7 to October 1, 2023
Art Hop Reception: September 7, 2023 – 5PM to 8PM
 
Transit by Edward Gillum

Our ideas, dreams and memories are our own. They help us weave our version of a reality that may or may not be in agreement with others, even those close to us. When is the last time you just did not see eye to eye with a friend or loved one? Choosing to agree to disagree can bring about peace without necessarily assuming the other’s perspective or point of view.

We are all capable of reconstructing memories of childhood. One memory might include playing a game called ‘telephone’ in which several kids sit in a circle, and one person tells a story or a joke to the person on their left, (or right), and as the story or joke is passed from one to the next person, finally coming full circle back to the first teller of the story or joke, and it is not the same as the original version.

This example of a commonly shared experience among many serves as one illustration of how each participant brings their uniqueness and differences to a given situation, establishing a clear depiction of their own personal thoughts, ideas, opinions, i.e. their perspectives and as such, their overall point
of view.

I work best when I am guided by a self-imposed system and/ or a set of fairly rigid parameters. And as a process for the upcoming show, I chose to give myself the job of reacting to the notion that everyone has a different perspective, so that for this installation, I would need to collect a large quantity
of perspectives. In this case that would involve searching and accumulating many visual images that illustrate a depth of space or perspective. The extreme heat we experienced in late July and early August gave me cause to stay indoors, enjoying the AC, (after the crisis of my AC going down on the
“hottest” day of the year), working on the computer searching for and then processing images. It dawned on me that the accumulation of many images of perspectives could be printed on wallpaper and formed into a cone, open on one end and at the other end – a point (of view). – Edward Gillum

Self Esteem by Jesse Merrell

While the Coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, our response to it has eased by many degrees. The COVID lockdown in 2020 certainly has made a lasting impact on our lives, both personally and professionally. Its effect clings to us in our motivation patterns, our work environment, and even our social lifestyles – with some too afraid to be as social as before and minimizing contact with others, and many others seeming to make up for lost social time.

Captive Isolation is a conversation of that difficult time. It is an interpretation and exploration of concepts of “Social Distance,” “Mask Up,” and “Lockdown.” How I chose to express this is with human figure and form, made bare, naked
and exposed.

The human nude is a classical prompt; often used in fine art illustrations and photography. In this series, I am relating this to the exposure to the coronavirus long before we were even made aware it existed and through the initial stages of the pandemic. Our bodies were vulnerable to the virus, and so
naked to the environment we were.

It was important to express a feeling of loneliness in this collection. Isolation does many things to the social mind, and being isolated, alone, and naked is certainly one way to illustrate this. Further, the concept of “masking up”
has become so commonplace now, but at the time was an imposition, a requirement. It can also be interpreted as us being ignorant of the goings on in the world, especially in relation to finding a viable vaccine. But in that sense, our masks can also be blindfolds or shrouds. 

Lastly, the exploration uses bondage and kink as a visual metaphor for the lockdown. The loss of freedom; unable to relax and socialize as we would so choose. Instead, and with the understanding of safety, we freely surrendered our mobility to our caretakers and leaders, and let them dictate our decisions.
This is comparable to the relationship that a dominant or master has over their submissive.

The other link to the lockdown that this series connects to is the hyper sexualization experienced by many, which may have been a mix of a need to connect socially, survival instinct, and even boredom. Add this to the mix of frustration, sadness, anger, and in some cases, joy, that the pandemic caused
emotionally and mentally, and we can conclude that our personal experience with the lockdown is deeply personal and individually unique. However, I feel we all can relate to some aspects of the works presented in this series; not only locally, but internationally as well.

We may have been captive, isolated, and alone; but as the human community, we were alone together. – Jesse Merrell

Alcatraz Tower by Travis Rockett

Over the last several years, I have been enamored with historical places. “Remnants of the Past” was born from my explorations of these places and spaces. It has been a collection that I will continuously update, as it really reflects an area I am passionate about: History. This selection of works comes from photographs while traveling to Bodie, CA and Alcatraz. Both places were a joy to explore, and I was amazed to see so much preserved in arrested decay. Between
the external shots, the interiors, and the details, I had so much to discover, and my drive to keep looking for more inspiration from the past was definitely stimulated.

I have always been enamored by the past. I enjoy working with my prints and trying to make them look more vintage or as though they were taken in a bygone era. This show has a combination of Black and White, Color, and Toned images, all of which I hope captures the essence of time and place, all while bringing my subjects into focus.

It is my hope that my photography inspires others to seek out these amazing places, and perhaps see if they can find my exact view! – Travis Rockett

Spectrum Art Gallery’s New Hours of Operation:

Thursdays and Fridays: 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Saturdays and Sundays: 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM