Natural History on the Move - Upcoming Exhibitions and Exhibitions to Date

We have made an effort to find a wide audience for our Natural History portraits. This fall they will be seen at Newspace Center for Photography,  Portland, Oregon and Lishiu Photography Festival in China. The exhibition history is gratifying.

June 8 - August 31, 2013
Historic Process/Contemporary Visions
Dina Mitrani Gallery, Wynwood Art District, Miami, Florida

July 5 - August 3, 2013
UnBounded! 2 Invitational Exhibition
Candela Books and Gallery, Richmond, Virginia

May 31 - June 2, 2013
“60 wrd/min art critic” review and performance by Lori Waxman
INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) - UW-Milwaukee

Hayden's Ferry Review Spring/Summer 2013, Issue #52

People’s Photo Book - launch for the Pingyao Photo Festival, September 2013
People's Photography Beijing, China, February 27, 2013 issue

February 21 - March 20, 2013
The Joyce Elaine Grant exhibition
Texas Women's University, Denton, Texas
curated by Sarah Kennel, Associate Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art

February 4 - March 13, 2013
Parallax, a national exhibition 
juried by Martha Madigan, artist and Chair, Tyler School of Art, Temple University
University of Notre Dame, Gormley Gallery, Baltimore, MD

Critical Mass Photographic Competition 2012 finalist, first round

October 19-December 13, 2012
Natural History solo exhibition
Portrait Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

September 9-November 24, 2012
Wisconsin Photography at Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin

July 25-August 18, 2012
FRESH
The Wall: Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
The Page: Blink Magazine/August 2012 issue
The Internet: Flak Photo /July-August 2012

May4-July 7, 2012
After Classical Portraiture, Schneider Gallery, Chicago IL

May 3, 2012
Digital Darkroom Slide Show Night
Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, CA

May 25-June 23, 2012
Alternative Processes exhibition curated by Christopher James
The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado

Diffusion Magazine, Spring issue 2012
Showcase of hand-coated processes curated by Blue Mitchell

Imprints Magazine, June issue 2012
Interview in Professional Women Photographers magazine
November 21, 2011

LENSCRATCH blog feature by Aline Smithson
"The stunning series … Natural History, features one-of-a-kind cyanotypes that incorporate portraiture and botanicals.
The juxtaposition of faces that show history and presence with the fragility of flowers and plant life bring a renewed energy
to the standard portrait."

November 3- December 2, 2011
Soho Photo's Alternative Processes Competiton
curated by Michael Paris Mazzeo First place prize
“My top choice was Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman's exquisite portraits of elderly women adorned with botanical
specimens by way of cyanotype photograms. An elegant elegy to old age and the passage of time, this work also nicely
references Anna Atkins, an English botanist and the first recognized female photographer, who is credited with publishing
the first book of photographic illustrations, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions."

Natural History at the Portrait Society Gallery

We are looking forward to exhibiting images from our digital/cyanotype project, Natural History, at the Portrait Society Gallery from 9 November 2012 through 5 January 2012.  Included in this exhibition will be cyanotype self-portrait project Decay, Utopia, Decay by John Shimon and Julie Lindeman and collaborative installation by gallerist Debra Brehmer and photographer, Nicholas Grider.

from Natural History, ongoing series

The transformation of “portraits into tangled shadows of time. Grafting techniques from the history of photography, the cyanotype impressions of botanicals pay homage to Anna Atkins’ use of the medium in the nineteenth century…They speak of evanescence and hidden nature.”

J. Shimon and J. Lindeman

  “An exhibition about our personal desperation to create a paradise and record its existence at our isolated rural Wisconsin farm. Such perfection can only exist in the haze of the past or future, making it absurd to approach it with the present-ness of photography, even with camera formats as reflectively cumbersome as 30×36 inches or as spontaneous as small-gauge 8mm movies. Our decaying, aging existence provides us with a stage as we face off with the elements, the uncontrollable plant world, broken-down farm implements, groundhogs, wasps, and mosquitoes.”

Nicholas Grider

This collaborative project between the photographer Nicholas Grider (MFA Cal-Arts) and Portrait Society pairs vintage portraits in all media with photo-derived word images. The exhibition will be in the gallery’s new “Lounge,” the smallest and most informal room of the new space.  From gallery owner and curator Debra Brehmer’s perspective, the exhibition is about loss (of all kinds) and the difficulties of communicating who we are and how we feel; the difficulties of being “known.” All of the vintage portraits, whether paintings, photographs or drawings, carry a sense of displacement as they have fallen out of context and out of a linear kind of history. But that may be a truer state than the assumed conventional ‘life,’ where we think we have a place, a permanency and belongingness.

Nicholas Grider, whose “Men in Suits” project was shown at the gallery in 2009, works in diverse formats. These word photographs present fragments of phrases, thoughts or song lyrics.  Disjointed, the broken phrases feel far more open and interpretive than they would nestled into completed sentences. Grider says this about his body of word images:

“I'm interested in how thought translates to writing and how writing translates to image so I have connected bodies of work that approach those ideas in different ways.  A kind of sub-lingual emotion or precursor to thought is represented by the abstract, swirling fields of pen lines; private, unspoken thought is represented by handwriting; and words spoken in conversation are represented by stenciled text in pencil and pen.  I've matched words and phrases to projects according to what I think a piece of text most suits, and I draw upon pop songs and popular sayings for the text pieces to make them possibly recognizable but unfamiliar in their new form.”

Fall 2012 Exhibitions