Ryan Stander: "Touching Photographs"
Exhibit runs: March 28 – April 27, 2019
The Arts Center Gallery is open
Monday – Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
and Saturdays from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm
Admission is always free.
If you have ever been in an antique store and spent time looking through shoeboxes of photographs you will enjoy this exhibition. The artist Ryan Stander invites viewers to consider human identity, memory, and the nature of photography, through the common photograph. With interactive installations and mixed-media work, Stander asks the viewer to engage the found photographic objects as unique meeting points of past and present, memory and identity, persistence and loss.
Twenty years ago, the contents of a re-purposed Nike shoebox punctured something within the artist. Such a simple box of old photos filled with unfamiliar faces, disconnected stories, and suspended conversations still hanging in the air. With each photograph he fumbled through, grew a deeper realization of our shared humanity and mortality. Stander wondered then, and still does today, who are these people? What are they doing in this box? Will this be our fate as well?
In our own photographs we recognize that time, that place, that event, and that face. That which was, remains in the photograph. Birthdays, holidays, and funerals all persist and linger (often outliving the subjects of their frames). Stories animate these objects across generations, but over time, the stories fade. Once disconnected, these photographic objects rest silently in a curious amnestic state. Unable to speak, they are cut off from us with an insurmountable and ever expanding gulf of history passing between them and us. And yet, while we hold and look at these objects and faces, they still have a strange power to touch and remain with us in remarkable ways.
As a photographer and printmaker, Stander’s work has been exhibited internationally in South Africa, China, Central and South America; and national in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts; and across the Upper-Midwest. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Minot State University.
More Info: http://www.jamestownarts.com
Event Start Date: 03/28/2019 Event End Date: 04/27/2019
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm
Sally Jeppson
701-251-2496
sjeppson@jamestownarts.com
Location Name:
The Arts Center
Location Address:
115 2nd Street SW
Jamestown, ND58401
Event posting from www.JamestownCalendar.com