Paths Divided/Typology/Beltrami County to Cumbria

Paths Divided was accepted into Art on the Plains, juried by Hesse McGraw, curator for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb.

November 12, 2011
Autumn Art Auction
NDMOA’s Thirteenth Annual Autumn Art Auction.The evening will begin at 6:30 with live music and appetizers. There will be 50 works of art by local, national and international artists. View the catalog online http://ndmoa.com/AAA2010/index.htm

Werner, 9/6 at 7:09/17 will be on display on the 1st and 2nd floor galleries at the Mpls Photo Center from June 24th to August 13th, 2011

]]> http://www.viviennemorgan.com/2010/03/new-blog-for-lakes-to-lakes/feed/ 0 http://www.viviennemorgan.com/2010/02/lakes-to-lakes-funded-by-state-arts-board-in-2010/ http://www.viviennemorgan.com/2010/02/lakes-to-lakes-funded-by-state-arts-board-in-2010/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:57:32 +0000 Vivienne Morgan http://www.viviennemorgan.com/?p=253 I am so happy to announce that I am a recipient of the 2010 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. In 2010 and 2011 I will be working on a series of photographs “Lakes to Lakes” which tie together place and identity, and explore the connections between the lakes of northern Minnesota and the Lake District in Cumbria, England.

The Lakes to Lakes project is born out of earlier work: A Sense of Place and my realization that this is this is the year to take American citizenship.  I have always been tied to the landscape and a place rather than it’s people or government, always tied to the south west of England with it’s rolling green fields and westward facing ocean, and this vision is how I have always defined myself.  I have maintained this vision even though I live in Bemidji Minnesota.  Perhaps this is because my daily world is connected through the internet.  I listen to the BBC and read English newspapers, watch English TV, and with my phone I can be connected even when I am walking along a lake shore in Minnesota.

The Artist Initiative Grant provides me with the opportunity to explore an area of England I have never seen, but shares some of the same characteristics as the place where I live.  It will allow me to think about the issues which surround identity, place, and allegiance.

I am particularly grateful to the State Legislature and to everyone who works so hard to keep the arts alive in this recession.   A lot of people are still trying to climb out of the fiscal black hole and struggling to keep their ambition.  Artists who receive grants this year have a particular responsibility to make this grant work on many levels for the community.  Arts grants now function much like the WPA in the 1930′s and 40′s: they keep artists employed, but more so, they feed back to the world a spirit of place and time.

I usually avoid shooting in January here in Northern Minnesota because I hate -20 weather.  This year the weather has been kind, and I’ve been out and about a bit. While I’m still sorting through and printing this work, this is one popped out just because it looks so much like the charcoal drawing I would have done had I ever bothered to draw this stand of hybrid poplars.  It’s a multiple exposure on my Nikon D300 with a lot of jiggling, taken on a day with thick fog, flat light, lots of ice on the trees, no processing beyond that.  My father in law, Bud Morgan, who was a WPA printer and painter would have loved it.

After Sanford Gifford

This is yet another photograph taken because I had seen something similar 30 years ago in art history class, where I  drew the composition of the paintings as the slides went by, making it stick in my memory.  That class, taught by Rena Coen (Joel and Ethan Coen brothers mum) gave me my first and preferred view of America, oddly enough.  For me these paintings became a sort of comforting if highly fictionalized view of a county I was living in but had not yet explored.  Nowadays I walk out with my camera in these wild forests, and there are moment when I see the kind of landscape that painters such as Cole, Church, Friedrich, Blakelock, Gifford saw, and I’m amazed that I can feel so connected to the land through them.

This is photograph, After Sanford Gifford is on view at the North Dakota Museum of Art now.  It is 30×42 framed, and for sale in the annual Art Auction, November 7. http://ndmoa.com/artauctionfall08/index.htm

If you are interested in any of the many works in the auction, you don’t need to be there to bid.  Instruction are online.  I like this because the winning bid is split between the artists and the museum.  It’s a great museum under director Laurel Reuter, and the fundraiser is a worthy cause.

Morning (over Larson Lake) was chosen for the Relentless Eye Global Cell Photography 2009.  You can see the chosen work here and the jurors remarks on his choices here.

Remember Every Detail in an Instant

There is a great exhibition at the Helen Day Art Center which I found out about and and uploaded a few images at the very last minute.  I wish I had taken my cell phone photography more seriously, but then again, that’s the beauty of the cell phone.  It’s a memory marker.  It’s a great thing to document the cats and chickens, remember a good dinner.  (I didn’t enter my cat or dinner photos, cute as my cats and chickens are.)

I have a few landscapes (of course) which are more like notes on an idea than good work. And I have a couple of panoramas made right in my iPhone with software by Debacle.  The goal of the software is to stitch together images seamlessly,  but the temptation to document in time rather than space and imply a narrative were in these images. Here are two, I might post more.  They are actually huge at 55″ so these are paired down a bit.  You’ll need to click on my images here to see them at a decent size. There are some interesting photographs in this exhibition, some mundane, some spectacular.  You can see all the entries on Picassa.

Curated by Odin Cathcart
Juried by Eirik Johnson

Cell phone cameras are the relentless eye of the global simulacra. Simple and everywhere, cell phone cameras have transformed how photography is practiced. Helen Day Art Center announces the first of its kind international call to cell phone artists. We seek entries that reveal the creative mind through this ubiquitous medium for a ten-week exhibition opening September 25th, 2009. Entries will be juried by the acclaimed photographer, Eirik Johnson.

This exhibition aims to exploit two unique properties of an emerging niché of digital photography — cell phone photography. The first is the ubiquity of the form. Nearly all cell phones contain cameras, making photography persistently available to novice and professional artists alike. How has this ‘availability’ changed photography? The second property this exhibition explores are the limits and possibilities of the medium. How will artists harness this new medium? What will the the relentless eye of billions of artists reveal?

Marple Tea (Remember every detail in an instant)