Janelle Young, Emily Barnett & Anita Douthat

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.

Janelle Young in an artist and educator currently living in Tampa, Florida. She completed her bachelor of fine arts degree in photography with minors in film studies and art history at the University of Dayton. Young received a master of fine art degree from the University of Georgia. She exhibits nationally and internationally, most recently in group shows at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, Rogue Space Chelsea in New York, New York, Henco Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina and the Jacksonville University Gallery in Jacksonville, Florida. She received a Hillsborough County Arts Council Artist Grant in 2019, the Society for Photographic Education Award for Innovations in Imaging in 2015, and a 2013 Individual Art Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

Morning Song (2015)

Young’s work pictures the intangible and the ephemeral. Examining the natural world, she creates experiments an runs observations through specific controls as a way to synthesize a vast and overwhelming universe. The result is a poetic engagement that affords the viewer a new sense of reflection. She works primarily within photography, where the relationship of art to science is undeniable. The camera, a product of science, is imbued with a sense of objective power. However, even the earliest photographs revealed some of the medium’s great contradictions – the camera is accurate and untruthful at the same time. The oscillation between contradictory notions of truth and fiction, the peculiar rendering of time and duration, and the capture of the seen and the unseen interests Young. These dualistic aspects of photography constantly guide these current investigations of pseudo-science, perception, phenomena and the sublime.

View more of Young’s work here.

Emily Barnett is a painter, printmaker, collage and installation artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout New York and the United States, including the Parrish Art Museum, the Heckscher Museum and the Islip Art Museum. Barnett has received numerous awards and grants including from the National Academy of Design, Salmagundi Club, New York Foundation for the Arts, City of Seattle, and National Association of Women Artists. Her work is represented in public and private collections including the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, City of Seattle, West Publishing Company, Adelphi University, and Sienna College. She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she teaches color theory, drawing and painting courses.

In The End One Has To Return (1997)

Barnett began as a painter of portraits and multi-figure narratives and then broadened her subject matter to include natural forms and scientific concepts. Although beginning as a painter, Barnett is also a printmaker, collage and installation artist. Her cyanotypes integrate elements from science and art. Photographs taken of a figure in water at night are interspersed with diagrams characterizing the structure of matter. Concepts relating to time, energy, subatomic particles and the beginning of the universe have always fascinated me. The cyanotypes explore those interests and were done in collaboration with Tom Vogt, a physicist who is currently the Director of the Nanocenter, University of South Carolina.

View more of Barnett’s work here.

Anita Douthat’s photograms are widely exhibited and held in collections including the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Columbus Museum of Art; and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Solo exhibitions include Under the Sun at the Weston Art Gallery in 2014 and With a Trace at the Indianapolis Art Center in 2007. In 2016, 2006, 2003 and 2000, respectively, her photograms were featured in two-person exhibitions with Cal Kowal at Xavier University, Ohio Wesleyan University, the Weston Art Gallery and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Group exhibitions include Lensless at the University of Louisville in 2019 and Wedded Perfection at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2010. She earned a B.S. from the Institute of Design, Chicago and an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. Douthat received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. From 1985 – 1992, she was curator of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University. She was registrar and associate director of Carl Solway Gallery from 1994 – 2017. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she currently resides in Alexandria, Kentucky.

Ascend (2000)

Many of Anita Douthat’s photograms suggest the presence of the human body. The diptych, Ascend, is from a series of mannequin images. A translucent plastic form substitutes for the body. Alterations is from a series of the same name. Torn and shredded clothing fragments allude to the body in absentia. The passage of time and illusion of movement are implied in each. Botanical specimens from her backyard, grapevines, interconnect the human body with the larger organic world.
Photograms are photographic images made without a camera by placing objects directly on the surface of photosensitive materials such as photographic paper and then exposing the combinations to light. The result is a silhouette-like image. The areas of the paper that have not received light appear light in tone. Those exposed to light appear dark. The image obtained is negative and often looks similar to an X-Ray. Some of the earliest photographic images, produced in the mid-19th century by inventors and artists such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, were photograms. The technique has been explored extensively from the 1920s to the present day by many artists including Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, Adam Fuss, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kasten, and Martha Madigan. In producing her photograms, Anita Douthat used printing-out paper, which is sensitive to ultraviolet rays. Her sunlight exposures were made between May and October, when the sun’s rays are strongest. The exposed paper was later chemically gold-toned and fixed for permanence.

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@1628ltd.com.

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