LIGHT
CACHE
Co-curated by Frank Konhaus and MJ Sharp
Light
Cache Curator's Statement
December 3, 2011—February 14, 2012
Light Cache Live—Tuesday, January 17th, 5:00-7 p.m. (presentation begins at 6:00)
Please join us for an artist talk, during which MJ Sharp will illuminate the process behind her magical long-exposure worlds. Additionally, MJ will be creating one of her signature long-exposure film images over the duration of the talk and will employ interested audience members to help her put the finishing touches on the composition. Look for the resulting image on the Craven Allen website later in the month.
Light refreshments will be served.
Craven
Allen Gallery
1106 1⁄2 Broad Street Durham NC 27705
www.cravenallengallery.com
Photographer MJ Sharp stays up all night making photographs. Her images, which she typically exposes for anywhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours, reveal scenes that are markedly different from those able to be seen with the naked eye. While human perception of a scene is limited by the available light, film exposed for minutes or hours has no such limitation. Light can accumulate on film to reveal exquisite details that we perceive in real time only as undifferentiated shadow. Whether that scene is a domestic one exposed by refrigerator light or a lone Scottish sheep by the North Sea, exposed by the bright moon of deepest winter, the resulting photographs are eerie, poetic meditations on what we otherwise overlook.
“With the moon as her muse and mid-century large-format bellows
film cameras as machine, she creates imagery not possible with modern
digital equipment,” says photography collector and co-curator of
the exhibition Frank Konhaus. “She quite literally awakens the night
and makes the darkness sing. Light Cache is a unique body of work. MJ
joins other Triangle artists like Beverly McIver, Patrick Dougherty, and
Heather Gordon who are reaching a national and international audience
with singular breakthrough work.”
About
MJ Sharp
MJ Sharp is an artist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. A
Tennessee native, she came to Duke University as an undergraduate ready
to major in chemistry, but one art history survey course with Professor
Rona Goffen completely derailed that original ambition, and ever since
that time her favorite compositions remain those from fifteenth century
Flemish altarpieces. She was the staff photographer at the Independent
in Durham for most of the 1990’s while also freelancing regionally
for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, PBS’s Frontline,
the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Ford Foundation, among others.
She went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC-Chapel Hill
in 2007 and has often been a visiting lecturer at area universities since
that time. She loves North Carolina in general and the Triangle
region in particular, and while she often strays far afield for her work
(the Texas Panhandle; the Scottish Highlands), she always loves coming
home to Durham.
About
Frank Konhaus
Frank Konhaus, a graduate of Duke University, is founder and principal
of KONTEK Systems, Inc., an audio/video system design and integration
firm based in downtown Durham, NC. Frank and his wife, architect Ellen
Cassilly, have created an award-winning contemporary home and artist space
called Cassilhaus, where he directs an artist residency and curates an
exhibition program. They brought French photographer and installation
artist Georges Rousse to Durham for a major community public art project
in 2006. He served as executive producer for a documentary film about
that project and is currently working in the same capacity on a documentary
about sculptor Patrick Dougherty. Mr. Konhaus currently serves on the
collections committee at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University,
is active in the Friends of Photography at the NC Museum of Art, and is
a passionate collector of contemporary photography.
Solitary
Sheep
Forty-minute large-format film exposure by moonlight
© 2010 MJ Sharp
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