Whichcraft

Mariana Vieira was born in Brazil and grew up in Central America. She studied photography at Georgia Southern University, where the darkroom became her second home. She relocated to Boulder to study at the University of Colorado and has called the Rocky Mountain state home since then. Mariana has been featured in exhibitions at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, among others. She currently works at the University of Colorado.

Vieira says that she stumbled into being an artist in a series of connected events. As a teenager, she lived in El Salvador where her father was on assignment for the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2001, a powerful earthquake destroyed much of the country, and Vieira's school was closed for a month. During her time off, she helped to organize the local UN headquarters library. While completing her work, she found a copy of UNICEF's annual publication, The Status of the World's Children. Inside she saw an image taken by the photographer, Sabastiao Salgado. The image was striking to Vieira. It displayed the image of a young boy, around the age of 5, standing in a landfill. Even though the child was standing surrounded by mounds of garbage, Vieira felt incredibly moved by the image. She says the child looked defiant, honorable, and courageous. Due to the circumstance of the earthquake and Vieira's presence in the UN library, this image stood as a symbol of hope and empathy. When Vieira discovered that both the photographer and the subject were Brazilian, she says that she felt an immediate kinship. The magazine page still resides in her studio today. These events led not only to a career as a successful artist but also as a respected photographic educator in her adult life.

Vieira will exhibit works from two separate, but connected, bodies of work. The first will be shown as an installation piece featuring 20 individual Self-Portrait lumen prints placed in an artist's book, which will sit atop a low table, requiring the viewer to look down upon the images.

A lumen print is created without a camera, using silver gelatin photographic paper, and is truly a work of whichcraft. The photographic paper is exposed to sunlight for extended periods of time, usually with objects placed on top of the paper for the duration of the exposure. The development process entails skipping the developer altogether and instead the paper is fixed, washed, and sometimes toned. Vieira's Self-Portraits are a commentary on cosmetic products used by women. To create the lumen prints, Vieira creates an impression of her face and body through the application of beauty products and subsequent contact between her skin and the photographic paper. Once the impression is created, the paper is exposed to sunlight. The resulting images are dark, rough, and unappealing, meant to challenge the intended purpose of the beauty industry. Women spend a significant amount of money on personal care products, including makeup and face care regimens. Not only do women purchase these items frequently, they pay more than men for similar items.1 Vieira's images ask not only of the economic cost of these choices but also of the hidden fears and anxieties exploited to encourage women to seek eternal betterment. Vieira says that this interaction reveals a crack in the protective veneer that invites what is lying beneath the surface to surge upward.

The second series of images on display in the Whichcraft show comes from Vieira's in-progress series entitled Eye Candy. For these images, Vieira employs colorful candy dissolved on watercolor paper. Then, using an image transfer process, she overlays images of pinup girls, creating the literal sense of a sugar rush. Both the candy and the pinup create a beautiful technicolor version of an altered reality. The combination is one that elicits our desires while simultaneously promoting consumption in a fetishized superficiality. The connection between the two works is clear. Women are expected to engage in grooming habits that maintain an external appearance, creating a version of the body that is thin, sexy, beautiful, and youthful, but at what psychological and emotional costs? The veneer is both artificial and temporary. With regard to both projects, Vieira says that her current work is an exploration of spontaneity that relies on aspects of instinct and the probability of chance. Vieira can control very little in these processes and says that she is still discovering ways to visualize the ideas that inform her work.

Melanie Walker has been a practicing artist for over 50 years. Her work explores alternative photographic processes, analog, digital, mixed media, large-scale immersive photographic installations and public art. She has received a number of awards including an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and an Aaron Siskind Award. She currently teaches in the Media Arts Area at the University of Colorado Boulder and has work in many collections including: LACMA, the Center for Creative Photography, Princeton Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Art.

Melanie Walker grew up heavily influenced by photography. Her father, Todd Walker, was a prominent photographer who enjoyed a career spanning six decades. Walker says, "Being around that sort of passion, curiosity, and the drive to always be producing, had a profound impact, along with the community of artists that were always around the house visiting or working on projects together." Walker's work demonstrates a gossamer quality that conveys a sense of longing that is nostalgic of the material of dreams. Walker says this characteristic is an attempt to communicate how she sees the world. Walker's earliest memory sets the stage for her later work. Walker was born legally blind in her left eye. Her first memory is from one of two eye surgeries performed when she was a child. She says that she remembers waking up wearing an eye patch and restrained to the hospital bed. As she looked out of her bed, she saw a chimpanzee riding down the hospital ward wearing a band leader's uniform. This surreal memory was confirmed later in Walker's career at an exhibition where she met another artist who happened to have had surgery at the same time in the same hospital. The sighting of the chimpanzee was also witnessed by this artist's father. Walker says that this bizarre memory has impacted much of the sensibilities in her work.

For the Whichcraft exhibition, Walker has created an immersive installation in a maze of printed silks called Silk City. The silk is semi-transparent, creating an ethereal quality that allows the viewer to see a duplication of imagery layered one in front of the other. Each silk is printed with the silhouette of a classic house shape, and inside each of the houses are various images of the landscape, clocks, buildings, and interior spaces. The connection between a need for shelter and the passing of time creates a dialog between the viewer and the installation that is individually dependent on experiences and personal connotations with the meaning of home. Walker says that she wants to create a dialog between the universal need for shelter and the human condition.

The architectural shape of the house is culturally specific and connotations of the term "head of household," as being typically male, are challenged as Walker states that she is a female head of household. Walker works diligently to think about gender roles and the desire of society becoming more gender inclusive.

Complementing Silk City is the display of numerous hand-crafted, plush objects mounted on sticks and placed in the windows. Walker's work is installed in a section of the gallery that has floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing light to pass through the silks. The plush sculptures sit inside the window troughs, creating a strong visual interest both inside and outside the gallery, effectively creating a life-sized diorama when viewed from the exterior. Each plush sculpture is sewn with a photograph printed on the cloth, taking the form of houses, hands, nautilus shells, and puppets with house heads. The effect is quite dazzling and embodies a sense of magical realism. The interior of the Denver Center for Performing Arts is not truly outdoors due to the large barrel-vaulted glass roof, which creates the illusion of an interior. The gallery itself presents as a large-scale diorama inside the theater space, leading to yet another diorama inside the gallery.

A highlight of the Whichcraft exhibition comes in the form of a viewing box observed through a secret lens cut into the wall. Walker has created a trompe l'oeil that utilizes a layering of forms and meanings created specifically for the Next Stage Gallery. Connecting the function of the Denver Center for Performing arts and the pre-history of photography, the viewing box exists as a diorama and homage to the theater and to Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, who created theatrical dioramas in Paris, prior to his contributions to the invention of photography and the process that carries his name, the Daguerreotype. The viewing box is an examination of a magical world and the illusion of reality that connects to the history of photography and cinema. To peer into the imagined scene, practices a form of singular viewership, which enhances the immersive quality and impression of standing behind the lens. Walker sees the frame of her camera as a stage in which mystery is created, as the viewer is asked what occurs just outside the frame or behind the curtains, and she invites her audience to participate in the illusion.

Carol Golemboski received an MFA in Photography from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999 and an MA in Art from The University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including individual artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation and Light Work. Her Psychometry series won the 2007 Project Competition Award from Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Golemboski's images have been published internationally in textbooks and notable photographic journals in the United States, China, France, Spain, Austria and Sweden. She is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Colorado Denver.

Golemboski didn't grow up imagining she would pursue a career as an artist. She has said that she associated being a good artist with people who could draw well representationally. Instead, she wrote stories, attended young writers workshops, and even submitted her manuscripts for publication at a young age. Her youth fostered an enjoyment for reading and writing fictional narratives, which has carried over to her photographic oeuvre. Amassing up the courage to share her writing at an early age also served her well in her photographic career, a trait she emphasizes to her students. It can be easy for creatives to give up, but the need to put work out into the world, without fear of rejection, is an important practice. For Golemboski, photography surfaced as a hobby after enrollment in an intro to darkroom course. As time progressed, she decided to double-major and added Art to her curriculum in Communications. After graduation, Golemboski made the decision to continue with visual arts, leading her to a career as a successful artist today.

Carol Golemboski's current series is titled: That Old Black and White Magic. The series connects the magic of photography with more common depictions of the performer, the magician, and the trickster. The images fool the eye and blend analog methods with drawing, photograms, and various toners on traditional silver gelatin photographic paper. Golemboski recently acquired a large amount of expired, mid-twentieth-century, silver gelatin film at an estate sale. She decided to give herself the challenge of making a body of work surrounding the unique limitations presented with expired photo paper, which otherwise turns black once placed in the developer.

Moving Targets 2019 is one iteration of this project. Each target is created by masking parts of the photo paper and placing it in the fixer before removing the mask, keeping the paper forever undeveloped. The targets are deliberately off-center and irregular, recalling the same off-balance effects of Marcel Duchamp's 1926 film Anemic Cinema, credited to his female alter-ego, Rrose Selavy. The images are hypnotizing, even though Golemboski's targets stand frozen in time. The illusion of the image is that motion was never captured in the first place. Golemboski employs various candy-colored toners, which are whimsical while simultaneously connoting the various interpretations of a recognizable symbol.

The multiplicity of meanings also recalls the work of Jasper Johns and his works exploring this device between 1955 to 1961. The Moving Targets move outside the realm of photography and connect to art history and the ways that symbols are codified into visual language. Golemboski says that she likes "to create visual puns and photographs with multiple layers of meanings." This work creates a stronger impact when installed in a grid, allowing the full visual plane to be consumed by the repetition of circular forms. The Moving Targets are more playful compared to the darker undertones of some of Golemboski's black-and-white work.

Trap Door 2015 is just one example of Golemboski's signature black-and-white works. Each image is created using a combination of the photo negative, photograms, and drawing to create an image that communicates a multitude of messages simultaneously. In Trap Door, two legs stand tied together with a length of white rope. On the feet are large black shoes adorned with paper fringe that is balled together in the shape of a porn-porn. The shoes recall a clown, but the fringe on the bottom of the figure's pants appears soft, lace-like, and feminine, creating an ambiguity about whose legs are tied together. Diagonal lines cross the backdrop behind the figure and appear to be written on a chalkboard, while dashed lines, in the shape of a rectangle, mark the trap door on the floor. Upon first glance, it appears as though the door is only an illusion until further examination reveals two hinges to each side of the frame. The image asks who is in control of the figure. There is an anxiety and feeling of anticipation as to when the door will drop. The composition is dynamic due to a curved decorative shape that rounds the bottom of the photograph, creating an arrow-like shape when visually combined with the legs.