Look This Way art exhibition

Look This Way, a new exhibition at the Cahoon Museum, features the work of regional artists Jodi Colella, Jackie Reeves and Kimberly Sheerin.

This exhibition presents the provocative new work of three mid-career women artists and offers an intriguing counterpoint to the daguerreotypes currently on view in the Museum's accompanying Through the Looking Glass exhibition.

Fiber artist Jodi Colella is fascinated by early photography and collects antique tintype portraits which she manipulates to create evocative artworks with dark humor and surrealist imagery. Her new series, Ghost Stories, is inspired by the uneasy postures and expressions evident in daguerreotype portraits, whose subjects were required to sit without moving for many minutes before their image could be captured. For Colella, these minutes also expose a sliver of the soul that she contemplates and then seeks to reveal and investigate.

Painter Jackie Reeves recaptures fleeting moments of personal history in her Memory Paintings based on old family photo albums dating back to the 1920s and super-8 home movies. Inspired by the daguerreotypes, she has created new works on aluminum, leaving more metal exposed to create images that flicker, shift, and change as the viewer moves by and light filters across them – much like a daguerreotype shifts from positive to negative image depending on which side is viewed.

Ceramicist Kimberly Sheerin has created a new series of portraits of women surrounded by ornate frames inspired by the elaborate designs used to protect and display 19th century daguerreotypes. In contrast to the ephemeral photograph, her monumental vessels memorialize in solid clay the lives of significant women tackling urgent social issues of global importance side-by-side women whose lives remain hidden and unknown.

Just as these artists question the gravitas of the photographer, they challenge the viewer to stop, look deeper, linger longer and to consider what their artwork truly reveals.

Time: 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.

Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art.