EXHIBITION: Vernal
VERNAL
Caroline Minchew
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, January 6th, from 5-8 pm
The calendar year will begin with photographic exhibitions by artist and educator, Priya Kambli and recent VCU Photo MFA graduate, Caroline Minchew.
In Caroline Minchew's Vernal series, large, dark, monochromatic imagery of swamplands initially reference a history of Southern photography, rewarding closer inspection with sedimentary layers of charcoals and pigments. These works are the artist's photographic retelling of the scientific observation of a specific forest ecosystem.
Vernal is a series of photographic works that renders the life cycle of an ephemeral pool as a shifting, mirrored form. Within these pools, matter is produced by the wearing of surfaces and energy rises from rot. Photographed in a regrown forest for over a year, this work considers how multiple stories of land, ecology, and memory can weave together into a larger parable, where parallels are drawn between the relationship of caddisfly to an ailing soldier. Vernal pools are a malleable subject that embody how reaching beneath the surface darkness and decay reveals a spectral network that is very much alive.
Caroline Minchew received her MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2022, and her BA in Studio Arts and Spanish from Sewanee: The University of the South in 2014. She has attended residencies at Burren College of Art (Ballyvaughan, Ireland), Mudhouse Artist Residency (Agio Ioannis, Greece), and Penland School of Crafts (Penland, NC). Her photographic work and research are published in Platinotype: Making photographs in platinum and palladium with the contemporary printing-out process. (Malde, P., & Ware, M, 2021) and Platinum and Palladium Photographs: Technical History, Connoisseurship, and Preservation (McCabe, C. ed., 2017). Her photographic works are housed in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American History and the National Gallery of Art Photograph Study Collection in Washington, D.C.