Castell Photography is pleased to announce the opening of their newest exhibition, SHIFT, with a reception to be held on Friday, August 3rd from 6-8pm, coinciding with the Asheville Downtown Gallery Association’s August Artwalk. We will serve specialty cocktails to celebrate the evening, we look forward to enjoying this very special opening reception event with you!

SHIFT will feature work from four exceptionally talented artists: Fred Cray, Sharon Haper, Anne Arden McDonald, and Lisa M. Robinson. The show is, at it’s most fundamental, about shifting time and space. Selected works appear to be the artists intuitive visual response to either their subject, their materials, or both. Essentially, the artists relinquish control, and engage in a dialogue with materials, processes, and/or subject matter that cannot be readily controlled. Images are not necessarily about what the artist is photographing, but rather about either the process of making the work and/or what the subject metaphorically represents, and their responses to these.
                                            

Image by Fred Cray

Fred Cray, originally from Evanston, Illinois, currently resides and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since receiving a M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, Cray has had an outstanding career of numerous group and solo exhibitions around the nation. Cray’s works can be found in many public collections, such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the California Museum of Photography, the Center for Photography, Bombay, the Center for Photography, Woodstock, New York, and The Polaroid Collection. Cray will be exhibiting a selection of chromogenic color prints from his Rome Multiple Exposures series. “The photographs”, Cray states, “continue an investigation into travel (literal and metaphorical).” The vivid overlays of saturated and distorted colors are expertly and miraculously captured in-camera… No Photoshop trickery here. These playful, yet consumingly complex compositions take the viewer on a colorful journey of Rome settings, but also further into concepts of time and space.
 

Image by Sharon Harper

Sharon Harper, originally from Samford, Connecticut, received her M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Harper’s work is in permanent collections at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Portland Art Museum, Portland Oregon, and The New York Public Library. She received an artist-in-residence fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work is represented by Galerie Röpke in Cologne, Galeria Arnés y Röpke in Madrid and Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City, and in addition, Harper is an Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Harper uses photography to explore perceptions that we cannot experience without the camera. Images from Moon Studies and Star Scratches are mesmerizing studies of moons and skies, patiently captured onto sheet film during single exposures of hours, days, and even months. Harper explains that her photographs included in SHIFT “are an attempt to record a realm we can hardly fathom in terms of time, one that suggests the vastness of the sublime, within a framework of time we can readily understand.”
 

Image by Anne Arden McDonald

Anne Arden McDonald, born in London, England, grew up in Atlanta Georgia, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. In the past 24 years of her career, McDonald has had 43 solo exhibitions in 10 countries, and has been widely published, including features in Eyemazing Magazine and Aperture Magazine. Her work is in the collections of numerous major museums, including The Bibliotheque Nationale and The Houston Museum of Fine Art. McDonald’s works exhibited in SHIFT are large-scale pieces involving experimental processes which require no film to create imagery on silver gelatin photographic paper. Seeming to have a dialogue with her materials, McDonald dances around her paper surfaces with bleach, fixer, objects, and even spices and household cleaners, experimenting with light and chemistry. The results are striking planet-like forms swirling around on photographic paper. McDonald says that her photographs are “about circles and spheres, meant to represent planets and atoms, to visualize the macrocosm and the microcosm of life as we know it.”

Image by Lisa M. Robinson

Lisa M. Robinson received her MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and after moving to New York, she became printing assistant for George Tice. Awards include a Fullbright Grant, “Top 50 Photographers” chosen by Critical Mass, and a nomination for the Santa Fe Photography Prize. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work, an Evelyn Stefansson NEF Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and more recently in-residence at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland. Robinson’s works included in SHIFT are from her series Oceana, and are, at their most literal, tumultuous, painterly images of ocean waters. Gazing deeper, however, these suble images invoke all of the senses, and offer a feeling of movement and poetry. Of the images, Robinson says, “Water and the atmosphere are forever shifting, changing in both subtle and dramatic ways. I am viewing the physical world itself with an understanding of its internal transformations and visible signs of upheaval.”

Gallery owner Brie Castell states: “This is by far the most exciting and rewarding exhibition to date for Castell Photography, and ultimately, is exactly who we are as a gallery, and is what our vision is all about. These works from four exceptionally gifted artists, delight, inspire, and send the viewer into deeper contemplation. SHIFT offers wildly engaging and complex compositions which transcend the literal, and swiftly bring to mind age-old questions of existentialism.”

The opening reception for SHIFT will be held on Friday, August 3rd from 6p.m. to 8p.m. Specialty cocktails will be served to celebrate the evening. The show will remain on exhibit through Oct 6th.