Thursday, September 19th, 6:30-8:30pm
Featuring Jeffrey Heyne, Greer Muldowney, Astrid Reischwitz, Anastasia Sierra, Elizabeth Wiese, and Andrew Zou
PRC Nights is a long-standing monthly tradition at the PRC. This free, program fosters a sense of community by offering an opportunity to share images and insights about particular topics in contemporary photographic practice. PRC Nights is open to the public and all are welcome!
The September 19th PRC Nights celebrates the exhibitors of Exposure 2024, the annual PRC Members juried exhibition. The exhibition juror, Samantha Johnston (Executive Director & Curator, Colorado Photographic Arts Center) writes, “As I finalized my selection for the exhibit, I saw common threads emerge, such as COVID-19 affecting us all in different ways and continuing to impact many peoples’ lives. There was also a focus on themes of home and place, not just the physical place we reside, but the towns and cities around us. History and found objects also played a role, and threads of space, time, and memory can be drawn through many of the works selected. I saw several artists working with self-portraiture and themes of connection, including exploration of social media, and consumerism. Together, these artists harness the power of photography to tell compelling stories that invite us to reflect on our shared experiences and the diverse ways in which we navigate our world.” The artists presenting in this event on the 28th will share work along these themes.
Jeffrey Heyne earned a B.Arch. from the Univ. of Cincinnati, and he cites his residency with painter Jake Berthot at the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy as being pivotal in the focus of his photography. Heyne’s work in Exposure 2924 is from his To Hunt a Moon series comprised of recent wintertime photos of Colorado ranch lands and mountains, paired with a 1910 vintage moon map by Walter Goodacre, from NASA’s 1960’s moon cartography files, and from NASA’s Apollo astronaut photo archives from 1969-1972. The images of this series are arranged, grouped, and collaged together melding the form and contours of the lunar topography with the snow covered hills and cattle pastures of Colorado. Purposeful color shifts and imprints of fencing, straddle and blur fade the line between the lunar and the terrestrial.
Greer Muldowney is an artist, photography professor and independent curator based in Somerville, Massachusetts. She received an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Studio Art from Clark University, and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston College. Her work often tackles the relationship of policy making and how it affects landscape, housing and community.
Muldowney’s work in Exposure 2024 is from her series, Monetary Violence, an ongoing body of work attempting to weave a narrative between the ever-changing visual landscape of Somerville, MA and its community players. Those moving to exploit the market, and those trying to preserve the town and themselves from eventual erasure. All of whom feel that the invasion of wealth is inevitable; where maybe the only answer is the truth of power pretending to be progress. Though Somerville is a place of specificity, these images also serve as a similitude for many communities blighted by economic disparity.
Astrid Reischwitz is a lens-based artist whose work explores storytelling from a personal perspective. She is a graduate of the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, with a PhD in Chemistry. After moving to the US, she fell in love with photography and began her journey to explore life through the creation of art. work included in Exposure 2024 is from her series, The Taste of Memory, which explores personal and collective family narratives woven through still life compositions, intertwining threads of home, heritage, and identity. Through the careful arrangement of ingredients and culinary artifacts, Reischwitz pays homage to the kitchen traditions that have shaped her family’s story. The compositions offer a sensory journey through the tastes and textures of traditions inspired by the family dinner table. Through the arrangements of everyday objects, she evokes the familiarity and comfort of domestic spaces. Each item from her family’s now uninhabited farmhouse holds a story, a connection to the past, and a reflection of the present. The repetition of tools becomes a symbol of the enduring legacy carried by objects through decades of use. From heirloom crochet doilies, passed down through generations, to weathered kitchen utensils, The Taste of Memory serves as a portal to the heart of home, a cheerful goodbye to a memory lost and an invitation to create a new recipe, a new memory, and a new story.
Anastasia Sierra is a Russian-born American portrait and fine art photographer based in Cambridge, MA. Her work explores the themes of motherhood, womanhood and connection. Sierra’s work has been exhibited in a number of group shows in the US and internationally. She is a Critical Mass 2022 finalist and has received the 2022 Griffin Award. Sierra’s work in Exposure 2024 is from her series Bittersweet, is an ongoing body of work about the conflicting emotions of motherhood – the love, the tenderness, the fears, the loss of self, the loneliness. In this series she collaborates with her young son to escape the chaos of their daily lives by creating a warm and colorful world of their own. She uses light and shadow as a metaphor, with their lives bright and colorful on the surface and piles of laundry, dirty dishes and some of the darker feelings obscured by the shadows. She makes these images to remember her son’s chubby thighs and golden hair, and what it’s like to touch his skin and feel the weight of his body while she can still carry him. Sierra photographs their love and her nightmares, with a superstitious hope that her fears won’t materialize if she spells them out in her photographs.
Elizabeth Wiese is a visual artist and photographer whose work incorporates themes of fragility, strength, movement and grace. She has a BA in Economics from Colby College and studied Design at Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris. Wiese’s work in Exposure 2024 is part of Free Spirit, a series of self portraits that celebrates the tranquility and elemental connection an individual feels when immersed in nature, an invitation to leave the pressures and pretenses of the interior behind and become one with the environment. Wiese has been a dancer for more than 50 years and loves expressing herself through movement. As a child, she danced and dreamed among the trees at her family’s nursery, the perfect refuge from the challenges of adolescence. Today, she is still drawn to these graceful arboreal forms, often seeing ports de bras and arabesques in their majestic branches. A primal sense of energy and emotion flows through her as she is called to join their dance, common rhythms merging as part of a much larger whole.
Andrew Zou was born and raised in Jiangxi Province, China. He lives in Boston, MA where he is a candidate of MFA 2025 in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He has received Anderson Ranch Scholarship in 2024, Graduate Dean’s Scholarship and Graduate Foundation Scholarship from MassArt in 2023. His photographs have been exhibited both in Cambridge, MA and Shenzhen, China, and published online by Photo Vogue. Zou’s work is an ongoing exploration of self-discovery, examining various aspects of his individual identity and self, self-observation, self-repetition, self-exploration, self-expression, self-awareness, self-love, self-satisfaction and self-transformation. Coming from a unique cultural and economic moment in China’s history, his aim is to provoke conversations about how queer communities survive in China and the challenges faced by his contemporaries and earlier generations in embracing their queerness in China. When photographing himself in private spaces, He creates an intricate and intimate relationship with himself, exploring his queerness within a space of self-protection. While photographing in outdoor spaces, He projects his consciousness onto the world, maintaining a connection with his surroundings and drawing energy from nature.