Fall Exhibition Artist Spotlights: Linda Alterwitz & Christine Zuercher

Christine Zuercher & Linda Alterwitz

This fall, 1628 will be showcasing the work of nine distinct regional and national artists in two photographic exhibitions: Square of the Distance and Close Contact: Photography, Nature, and the Alternative Process. These exhibitions explore and push the boundaries of what it means to create photography as an artist. The artist is not tied to the traditional taking of a photograph, but has the room to experiment anywhere from the initial capture to the final development of the image. Each artist challenges what it means to create an image using photography and explores how they can use the unique process of film developing to create something beautiful.

Twice a month the 1628 blog will be highlighting multiple artists across exhibitions with similar themes in their bodies of work.

Christine Zuercher is an astronaut and founder of the American Interterrestrial Society. She was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and received a BFA from the University of Dayton in 2011 and an MFA from East Carolina University in 2016. Her research has been shown on shortwave radio, the Space Race, and transmission technologies with a focus in interdisciplinary and alternative photographic processes. She is a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award recipient and 2019 Coca Art Prize finalist. She has a national exhibition record and was a featured performer at Harvard College and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California for the Media Arts Xploration festival in 2019. Her work can be seen in publications such as The Hand Magazine and Light Leaked. She enjoys photographing interplanetary adventures with collaborators and friends while in her spacesuit.

The early 20th century ushered in the proliferation of the vox humana, the human voice, transcending the bounds of average human limits. Radio waves crossed the diameters of the earth with historical precedence. Decades later, we traveled beyond our planet and the earth was photographed for the first time by the NASA Voyager Probes, altering our perception of the immensity of the universe and the smallness of our world. Our understanding of reality continues to be shaped by technology and how we use it to explore the unknown. Distant Transmissions explores ways in which the subjectivity of photography can be used to rewrite and reimagine a history that includes the powerful role of the female explorer.
Distant Transmissions #5 (2016)
The handmade prints in this series are grainy, out of focus, abstract landscapes. The nature of these print processes illuminates the tension between the innate ability of the photograph to record and our desire to re-experience memories. What we remember is a copy of an experience at best. Our memories begin to change and break down from the moment an experience happens. The aesthetics of the images in this body of work, the in-between nature of the photographs, demonstrate a lack of literal representation– the layering, covering up, and altering of memories through process. One of the methods used to mimic the break down of memory is Gum Bichromate, a photographic process that has a grainy, soft focused quality. This process creates an obscured, otherworldly aesthetic. Distant Transmissions examines the history of the human experience through photographs, objects, performance, and sound.
View more of Zuercher’s work here.

Linda Alterwitz is a visual artist exploring the unseen rhythms of the human body and our relationship to the natural world, employing photography, collage and interactive installations and participatory collaborations to visualize our physical and cognitive states. In 2015, Alterwitz was the recipient of the Nevada Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship. Her work has been published in Smithsonian Magazine, Orion Magazine, The New Statesman, Musee Magazine among others. She has exhibited her work in both traditional exhibition and site-specific installations in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China, Spain, Israel, Greece and Poland. Alterwitz lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Untitled #2 (2015)

By working with medical imagery and photographs of the natural world, the images in Complicated Beauty address the fragility of human life and the emotions that impact our daily existence. The images are actual re-photographed films of mammograms combined with the breast tissue imagery and images of familiar landscapes to the artist. This work raises awareness to the myriad of feelings including those of fear and hope in regards to challenging times in one’s life. These images are captured with a digital camera. Each image is printed as an archival pigment print. Each photograph is printed at 24″x24″ and signed by the artist en verso.

View more of Alterwitz’s work here.

All exhibit pieces are for sale. If you are interested in seeing the exhibition virtually, click here. If interested in purchasing or displaying art in the 1628 Coworking gallery, please contact us at art@tamaras.wpenginepowered.com.

A portion of the funding for our fall exhibitions was supplied through the FotoFocus 2020 Emergency Art Grant.

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