Guests are invited to celebrate the opening of the exhibition An Intimate Portrait of Motherhood with a reception on Tuesday, March 1 at 4:00 PM. Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public.
This exhibition forces the viewer to confront the sensual, intimate nature of breastfeeding and the physical mother-child relationship. Through photography and video, these two artists use the lens to examine and cope with the physical, emotional and mental complexities of the mother’s body. Katie Doyle’s work gives the audience a vantage point so close they feel as if they’re seeing from inside her, while her son suckles and consumes milk or entangles his soft limbs in hers. Ogier-Bloomer’s photographs utilize a frank, unapologetic voice shared between image-maker and subject: whether she appears in the image with her daughter, her mother, or from behind the camera. Both artists examine this unique maternal communication based in touch—a language without words, rooted in biology and the senses.
Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Anna Ogier-Bloomer holds an MFA in Photography & Related Media from Parsons School of Design, where she was awarded the Photography Department Prize in 2011. Shereceived her BFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was the recipient of the Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography and a Dean's Travel Grant. Ogier-Bloomer has exhibited at galleries and museums nationally, including the Bridge Art Fair in Miami/Basel, The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. She has received grants from Chashama in New York, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and CSArts Cincinnati. Anna has been an adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York. She currently lives in New York City and travels often for her work.
- See more at: http://www.wellesley.edu/event/node/81611#sthash.V6lNZjEu.dpufMichelle Hartney is a Chicago based artist whose work addresses a broad range of topics, from women’s health issues, to the concept of heroes, love, and the cosmos. She works in a variety of materials, including fiber, wood, found objects, and most recently, performance. Her interest in using art to address social issues began during her graduate studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was an Albert Schweitzer Fellow.
In 2015 she became the Chicago rally coordinator forImproving Birth's nationwide Labor Day rallies. Most recently, Hartney joined Every Mother Counts as arunning ambassador. With twenty-six years of distance running to draw from, including several marathons, triathlons, and running cross country and track for Purdue University, she is forming a team of men and women to race with and raise awareness about maternal healthcare issues. Click here for more information about joining her team.
I am a mixed media artist, exploring themes of the Maternal, Relationships, Sexual Politics and the Cycle of Life.
I am particularly attracted to Flora's life cycle; I link these to human experience using Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia, these are documented via Photographs & Sculptures, where inspiration from the natural world has become fundamental to my practice.
My sculptures are made from non-traditional materials, based on seeds, their shape & form are often reminiscent of human body parts
Currently my work focuses on pregnancy, motherhood and in particular the dynamics of Mother-Daughter Relationships, Since becoming a Mother myself, I have become obsessed with trying to document 'Moments' & 'Memories', and the 'Essence of my mother', in an attempt to understand the complex relationship that I have with my own mother.
Against Myself, Together I Stand:
I am an Artist, a Teacher and a Single Mother, all titles that I am proud to call myself. With all of these titles I bear the solo responsibility of telling our story (my daughter's and mine). I am her memory, guide and compass. Life moves quickly and the images that we make together are the times that we get to play and escape into our own world; my love for my daughter is infinite, and is chronicled by the images that we make together.
Truthfully I have really struggled over the years. I have done most everything in my life without money and shear determination. Whether it was driving across the country by myself for work, going to graduate school for photography or simply going it alone as a single parent. It is with a great sense of grit and hope that I have tried to approach most things with in my life.
I feel that at this moment that I am on the precipice of finding the work that I have been seeking to make my since I started. There is a calmness and playfulness that drives me now, a curiosity to keep exploring new things photographically.
The idea of working in separate panels stemmed from the struggle of having a wiggly small child and I wanting to find a way to get both of us in the photograph together. I wanted to make the photographs myself and did not want to, or could not afford to hire a photographer to do it for me. So I had to think about what I wanted in the photograph with us, and what the background was going to be like. The next question would be, “what will connect us and unite us visually”, then I would begin to construct my image in my head.
The introduction of multiple-selves into my current work began to materialize as I felt the burden of having to be multiple selves for my daughter. I have to be her protector, nurturer, fixer of broken toys and more. There are no breaks for the solo parent. I find myself simultaneously being several people at once on a daily basis. My daughter and I have created a small bubble that is the two of us alone.
The actual space of my photos is constructed, often due to the constraints of photographing in small spaces around my house or in quick shots taken with my daughter in our real daily life. The extension of panels, repeated visual space and simply flipped mirror images, helps to elongate the space around us, putting us further into the setting of my memory.
I am a single Mother, artist and teacher and all these things combined leave little time for the reflection on the immediate “now”, photography gives opportunity to my daughter and myself. Our journeys are full of life, taste, and laughter, indulging in the imagination of the very young and easily embellished imaginations. Life is awkward, and truth is painful, memories are not the truth and history will be a combination of all these factors anyway.
As a Mother/Photographer/Biographer I do not take the recording of our shared history or events lightly. However as a photographer I try to focus my view of life in such a way as to be able to see staged tableaus in every place that I encounter. I can see in my minds eye the moment before and after the event that I am capturing with my camera. There is a prevalent feeling for me in which I want to save moments, small moments that happen briefly and then vanish and are gone. I record moments in time so that I can go back and look at them again and again. I am captivated with light and the small moments in time that occur within every day.
Once the final images are twisted, turned, color corrected and turned again, even slight adjustments pop into place and then the meaning is there, it is saved, it is more truthful than the truth. I am creating the memory of my daughter’s childhood, the bubble in which we are in, our internal memory, whether it be flawed, imperfect or not quite real.