September 21 - November 30, 2023
From the Houston Center for Photography:
“Houston Center for Photography (HCP) is pleased to announce dust to dust on Thursday, September 21, 2023 from 6:00 P.M. – 8 P.M. The exhibition will feature works by Christine Elfman, Granville Carroll, Jonas Yip, and Adrienne Simmons.
Utilizing alternative photographic processes, dust to dust examines the substance of our being from the big bang theory and dust particles, to the nature of light on our real and imagined landscapes. Creation myths idealize our origins, the elusiveness of memory reshapes the understanding of our histories, and our illusion of continuity negates our ever changing existence – in dust to dust the Houston Center for Photography examines different takes on interwoven subject matters with four dynamic artists all using antiquarian photographic processes as components of their practice.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Christine Elfman: All Solid Shapes Dissolve in Light addresses the lack of permanence in the very objects that we’ve determined to be steadfast. “They say that rocks never die, they just change form. What if it were true of everything, including us and pictures? The change happens slowly, so we only notice it in hindsight, like the subtle shift of our faces over time, the photographs reveal so clearly.” With her camera, Elfman holds still the evolution that time insists upon by pairing images of hands and stones. Our flesh reveals our age–marking the passage of time; stone on the other hand appears timeless and equally ancient from the perspective of the very brief moment any one of us spends on this planet by comparison. This calls into question both earth’s and our own ephemerality. She uses the anthotype to further suggest our elusiveness and inevitable “fading away.”
Granville Carroll: Cosmotypes “…create(s) a meeting place where chaos connects to order and light is birth from the void of blackness.” By utilizing the collodion photographic process, Carroll imagines the origin (and conclusion) story of our world; creating stars, planets, and the cosmos out of light playing off the dark inky surface of the collodion plates. “My existence enables me to form new universes and thus, I reclaim the void of nothingness as a space of creation, a space of origin, and a space of power.” Carroll makes solid the very thing we cannot know.
Jonas Yip: Shan Shui manifests on instant film the artist’s expression of an inner landscape reminiscent of the Chinese Shan Shui landscape paintings; later scanning and digitally reproducing these tiny made up vistas. The resulting enlarged images are not representations of the mountains and clouds as we see them, but perhaps as the artist idealizes them. “The photo-sensitive chemicals in instant film, exposed to ambient light then hand-extruded, are manually worked in stages over time, capturing movement and gesture, recording evidence of the artist’s hand, ultimately finding expression in the collision of light, chemicals, film and physical manipulation.”
Adrienne Simmons: slacken + swell a site specific installation of cyanotypes, photo chemical crystals, and found objects–presents a fabricated urban landscape through detritus; literally and figuratively framing the artifacts found while on urban walks and communing with the pathways that present city dwellers with a manicured natural reprieve. ”Buffalo Bayou is roughly 18000 years old, a sleepy river of water that quietly supports diverse ecosystems, often going unnoticed until the wind shepherds in the next big storm. Over the past 100 years, history shows how the bayou has been shaped, molded, enforced, contained, and framed into a body of water that now serves our economic interests more than our natural ones.””
Reception: September 21, 2023 | 6–8 pm
Houston Center for Photography
1441 West Alabama Street
Houston, 77006 TX
(713) 529-4755
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