HOME

The Center for Fine Art Photography

Exhibition opening

December 2nd 2016

H. 5.30 – 9.00 pm

Curated by Kevin Miller.

Kevin Miller was the Director and Senior Curator at the Southeast Museumof Photography (SMP) from 2001 to 2014. He is currently an associate curator at SMP, which is a public museum located in Florida that holds the largest photography collection in Florida and is the largest exclusively photographic museum in the southeastern US. The SMP is one of one of the largest photographic museums  in the US and holds a significant permanent collection with strengths in general photographic history and contemporary photographic art. Since 2001 Miller has curated and presented more than 280 exhibitions and produced numerous catalogue texts and publications.

The selected artist are:

Francisco Alcala Torreslanda, Emily Belz, Mark Bennett, Ellen Butler, Douglas Caldwell, Liza Cauldwell, Michele Cohn, Pam Connolly, Ron Cooper, Gary Csuk, Cristina Cusani, Ashley Czajkowski, Saud A. Faisal, Alexa Frangos, Michael E. Gordon, Roger Grasas, Han Wenjie, Elizabeth Herrmann, Bill HIll, Christine Hinz Lenzen, Jodie Hulden, Shreepad Joglekar, Samantha Johnston, Tom Jones, Kurt Jordan, Jordan Jurich-Weston, Daniel Kaufmann, Marie-Luise Klotz, Gayle Krughoff, Thomas Ladd, Elisabeth Ladwig, Jennifer Long, Ellen Mahaffey, Ben Marcin, Teresa Meier, Charles Mintz, Colleen Mullins, Cal Navin, Rachel Niekamp, Ange Ong, Paul Scott Page, Joseph Pizzuto, Ibai Rigby, Charles Rozier, Kate Sandey,Fred Scruton, Alison A. Smith, Shannon Smith, Sarah Smith, Tomas Urbelionis, Alyss Vernon, Gabriele Woolever, Rana Young, Dianne Yudelson.

Serene, comforting, intimate, eloquent, secure, fragile, uncertain, precarious, even ambivalent. All these words can well describe any number of images in this exhibition. Home is such a wonderful and universal concept that it was always going to elicit profound engagement by these photographers. It is a deeply felt notion, but one which manifests so completely differently in each of our hearts and minds. It is a notion that is eventually discovered, identified and expressed in so many different ways and through so many unique prisms of belief, experience and perspective. The range of work was astounding; but how to pull some common threads together, give some emphasis to emerging patterns of thought, concerns and pre-occupations about HOME?
All of these photographers have clearly articulated their particular vision or concept of HOME. Their lenses and sensibility are directed to an enormous range of manifestations of home. Firstly, here in our privileged first world milieu we have images of secure comfort, even indulgence and intimacy. We also see images drawn from the margins of our own cultural moment; homelessness, improvised dwellings and living rough, right in our midst. We see what were once secure homes filled with life now abandoned, crumbling, empty or vanquished. These images quietly whisper an unease and uncertainty that lay beneath our comfort and security.
In some hands the lens examines other cultures where our own sense of home and our expectations would find little to be confident about. We see the lives of the less affluent and the more modest aspirations of people who seem closer to the land. People who have a more austere and essential life, with their elegantly spare interiors uncluttered by a surfeit of consumer possessions that are stripped bare to the essence of home; shelter, safety, community, family, wholeness. We come to these images, I believe with more than a small dose of admiration, even envy, for what might to some seem now like a “Paradise Lost” of wholeness, family and identity. But we also have images drawn from a darker sense of the erosion and precariousness of home in a more hostile world for some who must constantly struggle against the natural elements or the vagaries of government bureaucracy.
So, now we all come to our own thoughts, our wistful recollections and our warm reflections in the midst of these photographs that have made visual and manifest in the world; the sensibilities that each photographer has distilled and made still in one perfect image.  Kevin Miller

INFO:

The center for Fine Art Photography

400 North College Avenue

Fort Collins, CO 80524

U.S.A.

12.02.2016 – 01.07.2017

Tue – Fri | 10am to 6pm
Saturday | 11am to 5pm
Sunday & Monday | Closed
Admission is Free