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PRC Nights Online: Long Exposure Photography

ONLINE November 9th, 6:30-8:30pm
Featuring Douglas Breault, Sean Sullivan, Leah Abrahams, and Robert Knight

To attend this FREE event register HERE.


Douglas Breault, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea

Long-exposure photography can also be called time-exposure, or slow-shutter photography. The process involves using a long-duration shutter speed to capture the subject/s with an increased amount of light or with the intention of blurring, smearing, or obscuring the moving elements.

Douglas Breault is an interdisciplinary artist who overlaps elements of photography, painting, sculpture, and video to merge spaces both real and imagined. He kindles connections between the precarious nature of truth and an unfulfilled desire for certainty. Breault’s process blurs familiar objects and banal materials, like mirrors, furniture, and plaster, to reassemble traces of time with an interest in the limitations of photography. Photographs from the series “A Shot in the Dark” are printed directly on aluminum using a dye sublimation process, which reflects light similar to a mirror. His long-exposure photography does not use any digital manipulation. It presents imagery commonly used by Breault –– such as clouds, candles, and wilting plants –– to reference ideas of heaven and mark passages of time. Douglas Breault’s work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at various institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA), the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Space Place Gallery (Russia), the Bristol Art Museum (RI), the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts (NH), Amos Eno Gallery (NY), and VSOP Projects (NY). Breault has been an artist in residence at MassMoca and AS220 and was awarded the Montague Travel Grant to study in London and Paris in 2017. Douglas is a professor of art at Babson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Bridgewater State University. He has been a guest critic at MassArt, Kansas City Art Institute, Clark University, and the Slade College of Art, among others. Breault is the Exhibitions Director at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA and he received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA in Studio Art from Bridgewater State University. He currently divides his time between Boston, MA, and Providence, RI. 

Sean K. Sullivan is a Boston-based Fine Art Photographer who focuses on creating strong graphic images with a focus on color, details and strong lines that draws in the viewer.  Sullivan’s newest series, Eighty-Sixed, explores abandoned structures at night through the use of long exposures and light painting to further enhance their rundown nature. These forgotten places represent a loss of identity, family, and time. Sullivan believes that photographing at night highlights the quietness and lack of humanity in the buildings. By using an artificial light source to light paint my subjects he creates the light which transforms the scene revealing the colors and details that lurk in the shadows. The colorful textures reflect the depth and history of each place and in exhibiting this work, he includes a background history of each property. Sullivan’s previous series, Classic Style, captures the details and lines of classic automobiles. In 2017, He was selected for the Critical Mass Top 200 and in 2014 was featured as an Emerging Artist by Panopticon Gallery. Sullivan has been exhibited nationally, most recently at the Griffin Museum of Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, Danforth Art Museum, The Curated Fridge, Darkroom Gallery, Panopticon Gallery, Plymouth Center for the Arts and Morse Institute Library.  He holds a Bachelor of Science from Northeastern University where he majored in Graphic Design and Minored in Photography, and he studied with Neal Rantoul and Tom Petit. 

Leah Abrahams, the door

Leah Abrahams is a Boston-based visual artist who enjoys shooting abstract subjects, humans, objects in her environment and life in other cultures. She has been juried into numerous group shows, and had several one-woman shows. Her work is in corporate and private collections as well as Brown County Museum. Abrahams co-founded a co-op art and studio gallery in Wisconsin and is currently curating a show of Haifa and Boston artists working in multiple mediums. Her photo book “Do You See What I See?” has been selected for inclusion in the 13th Annual Self-Published Photobook Show presented by the Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson NY and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA. Abrahams intervenes in the process of photographing what she actually sees through movement. “In my first experiment, soon after I learned about the effects achievable with long exposures, I put my camera on my dashboard and set the timer to keep the shutter open for 15 seconds, all the while driving 70mph on a Wisconsin highway… Then I discovered that by jiggling the camera and moving it purposefully, I could produce even more engaging patterns. Sometimes the lights were moving, sometimes only my camera was moving or both happened simultaneously. The light photos I create reminded me of listening to jazz.” From the US to Cuba, Panama, Australia and other places Abrahams has experimented with long exposures, initially only applied light effects, and later in to capture the movement of everyday life. “Overall, how I move my camera and how long I permit light to enter, these decisions reflect my personal feelings about what I’m seeing and my desire for pleasing compositions. Not every outcome passes muster and many are discarded.”

Robert Knight received an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and a BA in architecture and economics from Yale University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Danforth Museum of Art in Massachusetts, Jen Bekman Gallery and Light Work in New York, the LaGrange Museum in Georgia, The Bascom in North Carolina, the Houston Center for Photography in Texas, and at photography festivals in Nantes, Le Mans, and Arles, France. Knight has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA, the Munson Williams Proctor Art Museum, Utica, NY, the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY, and the Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland. Knight often utilizes long-exposures to emphasize the differences between stationary physical elements and the people that inhabit and interact with the spaces. “In my current project Where the Visitors Are, I explore the interactions between people and art objects in museums and in public spaces. In contemporary culture, works of art, particularly those by artists deemed iconic, have become fetishized and our engagement with them ritualized. They are sought out for brief moments of contemplation and adoration, often captured with a cellphone image or selfie to document the experience. My work explores these encounters while exposing the artificial grandiosity of the spaces in which these moments occur.”