On Saturday, January 19, Crooked Tree Arts Center opens “Here and There,” a photographic exhibition showcasing the work of photographers Jin Lee, Larson Shindelman, and Regan Golden.
An invitational exhibition, “Here and There” considers themes of place in time through three unique bodies of photographic work. Cameras have long been used to capture and preserve the world around us; the artists included in this exhibition photograph their surroundings in order to tell unique, personal, and unexpected narratives. Topics such as privacy, technology, beauty, and the environment are explored in this exhibition through images of varied landscapes.
Self-described as an artist “working with the heroic and sublime subjects of landscape art ... within everyday situations,” Jin Lee’s photography strives to capture the ways a familiar place can provide a framework for one’s life, while still providing a powerful sense of wonder and discovery. Her photographs are, in part, a highly personal investigation of Chicago, the city where she lives, and the surrounding natural environments. Her work also explores the possibility of transposing the sublime onto a more intimate scale. “My goal is to develop a sustained relationship and a connection to the place I live by paying attention to and photographing particular things over and over again,” said Lee. Selections from Lee’s “Great Water” series, a series exploring the “various states and moods” of the lake, will be on display.
Lee holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently an associate professor of photography at Illinois State University, Lee’s work is part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and she has exhibited across the U.S., Europe, and Korea.
Larson Shindelman, the creative collaboration of photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman, has been producing collaborative work for solo exhibitions and site-specific projects for the last ten years. Selections from their “Geolocation” series will be on display. In this series, Larson and Shindelman scavenge Twitter feeds to find geotagged tweets. They then travel to the tagged location and photograph what they find. The resulting images explore ideas of privacy and intimacy in an increasingly digital world.
Nate Larson holds an MFA from Ohio State University and is a current faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Marni Shindelman holds an MFA from the University of Florida and is a currently faculty member in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Larson Shindelman have exhibited their work throughout the U.S. and abroad, with site-specific projects having occurred in New York, Indiana, Georgia, California, Florida, and internationally, in New Brunswick, the U.K., and Russia. Their work is also in many institutional and private collections.
Regan Golden depicts ecological change in the American landscape using drawing materials and altered photographs. For “Here and There,” Golden will present images from her Prairie Constructs series, which depicts nature found within urban landscapes: prairie along roadways, train tracks, and unexpected places in the artist’s neighborhood. In reflecting upon her work, Golden stated that “the forces at work in my images are light and darkness (reflectivity, translucency, brilliancy, absorption), entropy and decay (films, residue, accretions, dissolution, cuts), and moisture (wetness, drips, condensation, melting, steam, droplets, icing over). I use these elements to produce and preserve the extraordinary in the unkempt spaces of urban nature.”
Golden has received numerous grants and fellowships including those from The Core Program Fellowship in Critical Studies at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; The Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant; and a long-term Ecological Research Grant in the Arts from the National Science Foundation. And she was named the first Artist-in-Residence at the College of Biological Sciences Conservatory at the University of Minnesota, a home for rare and endangered plants from around the world, during the 2016-17 academic year. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Harvard University’s Fisher Forestry Museum, The Cue Foundation in New York City, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Golden is currently a lecturer in Drawing, Painting, and Critical Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
“Here and There,” and the works of Jin Lee, Larson Shindelman, and Regan Golden, will be on display through Saturday, March 30.
