PORTFOLIO 2023

Juror: Shana Lopes, PhD

Assistant Curator of Photography
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Exhibition: May 15, 2023 – July 7, 2023
Open House/Reception In-Person at the APG Gallery: Thursday, June 15, 2023, 6-9pm
Virtual Juror/Artist Talks: June 1, 2023, 7-9PM

Featured Artists

Aline Smithson
Ashleigh Coleman
Denise Laurinaitis
Justin Carney

Alternate Artists

Diane Meyer
Jason Lindsey

Juror’s Statement

Selecting works for a juried exhibition is an exciting, albeit difficult task. It is a humbling experience, during which I see a great deal of talent in a short amount of time. It is also an incredible learning opportunity, since I am introduced to the photographs of many emerging and mid-career artists that I might not have seen otherwise. Most importantly, being a juror allows me to take the temperature of the field and witness thematic and formal trends that emerge across submissions. Without a doubt, the conceptual threads always surprise me. Perusing hundreds of pictures in a concentrated period of time gives me a glimpse into the questions artists are posing to address what is at stake for them right at this moment. Photography’s relationship with time and memory, grief, family, and community are among the various themes that course through this year’s tremendous submission pool. Some artists attend to one of these ideas conspicuously while others touch on a number of them indirectly. That said, in each submission, what is invariably palpable is a genuine love for and fascination with the medium of photography– its endless possibilities and rich potential to inspire and shape new perspectives of the world.

Thinking about the life span of digital photographs and how that affects personal and collective memory are deep concerns for artists Aline Smithson and Diane Meyer. In the case of Smithson, her interest lies in the disappearing family album with the advent of the digital era. Merging nineteenth-century form with twenty-first century graphics inspired by file corruption, Smithson’s ghostly silhouettes touch on the loss of material photographs in the home. The medium’s connection with memory is also critical for Diane Meyer. Taking the Berlin Wall as her point of departure, Meyer traces its former presence in the German landscape with embroidery. At once haunting and beautiful, the stitches perforating the photograph’s surface recall the square structure of pixels and calls attention to the medium’s limitation to convey history once an event has passed or a physical trace is absent from a place.

In a related vein, the medium’s connection with loss and grief occupies artists Justin Carney and Denise Laurinaitis. In Carney’s evocative series and the disappearing has become, the artist copes with the death of a family member through acts of abrasion and painting on family photographs. By carefully reworking personal photographs of loved ones to the point where the images hover between the real and the imaginary, Carney encourages us to consider photography’s role in the healing process. This series also speaks to how memory changes over time, becoming more fluid and hazier as the years pass. Laurinaitis’s project is borne of loss as well. When she was five years old, her father passed away. He was her family’s photographer, so his absence created a simultaneous void of new photographs in the years following his death. It was this memory coupled with her own son turning five that prompted the artist to photograph her own children. Hope and grief intermingle in her stunning visual exploration of this new generation.

Notions of family and parenting are critical to Ashleigh Coleman’s series Hold Nothing Back. Skinned knees and partially eaten, glistening strawberries represent the quotidian, yet suggestive details that bring Coleman’s photographic world to life. Made with an economy of form, her colorful images project a state of pure fascination with rural life around her. Jason Lindsey’s project also grew out of his role as a parent and thinking about how climate change will impact his son’s generation. Using found glass lantern slides that portray the world’s glaciers, Lindsey literally shatters these images of ice and snow-packed embankments, cracking them like a sheet of thin ice. This violence directed at the slide is a nod to the brutality happening in the world today and the tenuous state of our planet.

Both Michael Young and Preston Gannaway examine a single community in great depth. Young photographs the residents of Greenville, Kentucky in its parks, sidewalks, churches, and landscapes. In exploring the town from which his partner hails, Young asks: how does space play a critical role in shaping who one becomes? Maybe Tomorrow represents a lyrical dive into ideas of home, queerness, and conformity in the South. Gannaway’s moving project Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea looks closely at the neighborhood Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, where the artist lived for several years. This series is a rhapsodic, even sumptuous portrait of a place and a community, one on the brink of change.

William Karl Valentine trained his lens on his own community in the eighties, when he entered the police academy in Southern California. Over his career in law enforcement, his camera was often at hand, giving us an insider’s glimpse of a profession not frequently available to the layperson. In these captivating and often humorous images, we see everything from the camaraderie between officers to jarring arrest scenes.

Simone Lueck finds and builds her own network of collaborators; her project begins with a craigslist ad searching for mature females posing as glamorous movie stars. Photographed in their own homes among their floral bedspreads and animal skin rugs, these women pose proudly in their glittering fitted gowns from another era. The contrast between their everyday surroundings and their attire is beguiling and makes me want to see more of this wonderfully eccentric series.

Thank you, Atlanta Photography Group, for inviting me to be a juror for this open-call Portfolio 2023 exhibition! All the submissions were fantastic, and I only wish I could have congratulated the artists in person.