Figures & Space | Opening this Friday, June 7th, 6-8 pm
Castell Photography Gallery is pleased to present Figures & Space, the gallery’s 2013 Summer Salon Exhibition, featuring photo- based works from from two consigned gallery artists, Roger Ricco and Lauren Semivan, as well as Eric Baden and Elizabeth Fritts, both showing at the gallery for the first time. The show opens THIS FRIDAY, June 7th from 6p.m. to 8p.m, coinciding with the Asheville Downtown Gallery Association’s June Artwalk.
Elizabeth Fritts
The exhibition is, at it’s most fundamental, about the ways in which these image-makers choose to handle their subjects and their surrounding environments, and the resulting conversations that these relationships create. In Elizabeth Fritts’ work, we see the exploration of her relationship to “the wild” through play in extreme landscapes. All images include a single figure (the artist herself) interjected within a natural landscape. The artist states, “the body in ‘Dear Wild’ flirts with various expressions of envy: investigation, immersion, mimicry, invasion.” Fritts travelled extensively in shooting this series- images were made across the coast in North Carolina, New York, California, Virginia, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Colorado. Eric Baden’s featured works all deal with the interaction between time and space within Peruvian coastal desert. The play between the landscape and the elements within it speaks not only to the desert itself, but also to our relationship with and effect on that environment. Baden says his work depicts the landscape from multiple views, “examining structures of momentary stability and the influences of memory and anticipation on the perception of the environment.”
Eric Baden
Roger Ricco
Each of Roger Ricco’s photographs is created within the confines of a tabletop set, involving simple, often mundane objects, but Ricco’s use of light itself becomes the subject. The artist states: "I have been a painter throughout my career, and the paintings and the photographs have much in common both in subject matter and in my concern with seeing the simple object and transforming it. Thus any thing from a stick to a streak of light are my subjects. My task is to make them visible anew.” Ricco transforms mundane objects into important relics, making them the mysterious central objects in each of his works. Lauren Semivan’s works each serve as a documentation of a preconceived or an imagined event in which the artist is utilizing both control and the unknown. These narrative works consist of staged sets or scenes concocted by the artist, utilizing a combination of objects, drawings, the human figure (always the artist herself), and other props. The artist states: "Within each image, ghosts of previous drawings create a sense of time suspended, evoking gesture, atmosphere and memory. Photographs allow me to access the extraordinary, to keep a record of dreams, and toemploy the uses of the unknown." The artists’ use of space - seen through the play between her set, her props, and her figure - creates a pitch perfect balance.
Lauren Semivan
Elizabeth Fritts, an emerging artist, received a BA in photojournalism in 2006 from the University of Georgia. Fritts has been in many group exhibitions and also had a solo exhibition of environmental portraits of Ugandan women at Think Art Gallery, New York, NY. Originally from Louisville, KY, Frittds currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Eric Baden of Asheville, North Carolina has been widely exhibited around the country, and his work is in the public collections of the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and the Westlicht Museum for Photography, Vienna, Austria. Baden is currently Professor of Photography and Chair of the Art Department at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC. Roger Ricco is co-owner of Ricco/Maresca gallery in New york City’s Chelsea gallery district, and is also an accomplished artist. Ricco studied fine art at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and won the prestigious Rome Prize in painting during his senior year. Ricco teaches and speaks the across the country on creativity and art, and art collecting in general, and also teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Lauren Semivan received her MFA in photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006. She has taught at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, Virginia Commonwealth University, and has served as a guest lecturer at multiple universities and art centers. Semivan's work has been extensively shown in both solo and group exhibitions around the country, and she was a selected artist for Critical Mass 2012.
The opening reception for Figures & Space will be held on Friday, June 7th, from 6p.m. to 8p.m. Specialty cocktails will be served to celebrate the evening. The show will remain on exhibit through July 27th.
We hope to see you THIS FRIDAY evening!
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