Fall Exhibition Artist Spotlights: Kirsten Ledbetter & Tracy Longley Cook

Kirsten Ledbetter & Tracy Longley Cook

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.

Kirsten Ledbetter is an artist and educator from Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Science in Art Education and her BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 2017. She lived in Cologne, Germany from 2017- 2019 where she worked for the Museum Ludwig as a freelance art educator. Kirsten is currently a student in the Master of Fine Arts program at the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. She is an interdisciplinary media artist, intrigued by process, light, and the ideas of the temporary. Her works consist of alternative photographic techniques, cyanotype, drawings, watercolor works, and collage. She will graduate from the University of Cincinnati DAAP in the spring of 2021.

25 Mai, Brühl, Paeonia suffruticosa 2 (2020)

Ledbetter’s artwork is about ephemeral moments in time that captured through tangible media in order for these ephemeral moments to be relived. Intrigued by light and the ideas of the temporary; Ledbetter delves into the process of creating as an immersive experience through the accumulation of experience. Light and the passage of time are things that cannot truly be contained, even by photography and video. Her works are interdisciplinary and process centric. Through her work she touched and preserves these fleeting moments of human experience, to make them tangible by capturing them through drawing, cyanotypes, video, sound, and film photography. The work captures fleeting moments by way of drawing shadows as time passes using, cyanotype, collections of natural objects, and photography to manifest a moment.

Tracy Longley-Cook (b. 1973, Coronado, California) has her BFA and MFA in photography from the University of Washington (1997), and Arizona State University (2007). Tracy also studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops residency program from1994-95. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of photography at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Tracy’s work has been exhibited at Tilt Gallery and the Rayko Photography Center, and publications include Manifest Gallery’s International Photography Annual, and the Elements of Photography, 2nd edition by Angela Faris-Belt. Tracy’s interests as a visual artist, educator and curator are strongly influenced by themes relating to place, transformation, and perception. Through the use of experimental and traditional techniques, Tracy incorporates a variety of working methods into her photography, prints and books.

In this series of photographs explores the relationship between the personal and geographical landscape. Utilizing her own body and photographic chemistry to create a series of unique images on film, this work mimics aerial landscape photographs, where scars, hair or wrinkles are reduced to black and white lines that emulate land and water formations. A symbolic correlation is drawn between the earth’s surface, which reveals a record of natural and man-made alterations, and the body as a record of individual experience.

Topography #18 (2017)

The method of imprinting fragments of the body on film is a cameraless process. Photographic chemistry is placed directly on the skin, and then pressed onto film before exposing it to light, or artifacts from the body are collected and placed in an enlarger and exposed onto film. The resulting negatives are then scanned, cropped and printed as large-scale digital prints revealing abstracted impressions detailing the physical body.

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.

4.9 out of 5 stars based on 50 customer reviews

Tagged

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *