PROCESS

On view: December 6th 2024 - February 6th 2025
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, December 12th, 6pm-8pm

Photography is not just the final product; it is the journey, the labor, the materials, and the moments of transformation. Process is an exhibition that celebrates the act of creation itself—where the process to make the work becomes as significant as the outcome. This exhibition highlights works deeply influenced by the techniques, methods, and the collaborative engagements that shape them.

Using experimental techniques, traditional alternative processes, and the dynamic interplay of multiple voices, Process celebrates the act of making— blurring the lines between artist, materials, and viewer. The process is not hidden behind the finished work, but is revealed for the viewer. Whether through the use of alternative processes such as cyanotype, printmaking, camera-less photography, or the melding of individual voices in collaborative efforts, the artists featured in Process invite us to engage with the work at every stage, experiencing art as it is being made rather than as something final and fixed.

We invite viewers to step inside the process, to appreciate the techniques and methods that make these works possible, and to celebrate the inherent beauty in the act of making.

Lisa Tang Liu & J David Tabor

“Formless form, image of the unimaginable; call it certain uncertainty.” –Laozi, Dao De Jing

What would pictures look like when two strangers from Boston and Phoenix, separated by 2,700 miles, collaborate and double-expose one roll of film? 

Isolated by the pandemic, in a polarized, less-than-united United States, many turned to photography as an outlet, and Instagram for community. Some began to participate in an analog photography revival, perhaps clinging onto something tangible in the ever-encroaching virtual world. We are two such photographers who connected on Instagram over our return to the film medium, Holga cameras, and conversations about Daoism–philosophy about living in balance and harmony. 

In the spring of 2023, we began our experimental collaboration in ”film swaps,” the practice of having one photographer first expose images on an entire roll of film and mail it to another, who would then expose the same film again from the beginning. Massachusetts and Arizona are very different places–geographically and politically. We wanted to see how images from such different places would look together. Each of us had no (or very little) knowledge of what the other person had photographed. The end results here are all surprises. 

Challenged with the uncertainties of using film and the discomfort of relinquishing control over the fate of our own individual creations, we learn to accept, and even embrace, the unknowns.

Sara Silks

"Natsukashii" is a word which stands for the state of "feeling nostalgic" or "fond/sweet memory."

“I had gotten a sample pack of printing papers about ten years ago, and finally opened it to discover may types of washi papers in it, including one with long silken fibers, called Unryu.I decided to print a small still life of roses taken through my mother’s magnifying glass with it, and it was fabulous. I used some of my white beeswax and lavender mixture that I made for my platinum prints on it, lovingly burnishing the thin surface coating until it had a warm glow. I could imagine my landscape images printed this way, and began collecting photographs from all locations and from all time periods to consider. These are some of those, taken from locations far away and from places as close as my backyard. I find the area of the image that means the most and select that part to print.

These images are printed on Unryu Washi and each have a thin hand-burnished layer of a proprietary wax mixture on the surface..”

Fruma Markowitz

“Searching for the Kahinah” is part travelogue, part archive, part fact, part flight of fancy, but mostly a visual journey through the many interwoven narratives comprising the unique fluidity of culture and tradition characteristic amongst women of the Maghreb (North Africa). During my own travels in Morocco, I learned how Jewish, Muslim, and Amazigh (Berber) women shared a confluence of stories and myths, religious beliefs and practice, personal adornment, and handcraft design for centuries - and became intrigued. I found it remarkable that peoples we in the West consider at odds with one another, in fact lived side-by-side with respect for years, mostly because the women amongst them made it so. This concept is foundational to my project.

The work draws additional inspiration and imagery from a vast archive of images I discovered dating from the turn of the 20th Century. The photographs depict women, clearly labeled as “Jewish,” “Arab Muslim” or indigenous “Berber.” The photographs were made by male photographers, at a time when North Africa was being colonized by Europeans. They were sold commercially as postcards for tourists; “souvenirs” of a way of life considered antiquated, “barbarian,” and destined to be replaced by a superior (French) Empire.

As a Jew, and a woman, and a photographer, I find in these portraits and what I’ve learned about them, a significant point of reference for my own identity and experience. And since October 7 of last year, this story of friendship has become only more poignant. My instinct says to me that if women were running the show, things could look very different in the Middle East today. And so, the Kahinah, who was a real historical figure of the 8th Century, embodies precisely that female strength, a model of heroism and leadership for Jewish, Muslim and Amazigh people alike. She is my muse.

My imagination and a pair of scissors literally cut the portraits out of this posed, imposed reality, and offers them another world - a woman’s world - where my historical research coupled with their shared connective tissue can be realized within a new context, far away from the romanticized version of them as “other.” Cyanotype, with its rich blueness, is, for me the appropriate foundational process to use in making these works. Blue is not just any color in the cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. In this part of the world the color blue represents a deep spiritual force that protects against the Evil Eye, of which women are to a large extent, the arbiters thereof.

My images aim to turn all that on its head, to reverse the gaze that is male. Here I’m offering a point of view that, between moments of factual observation and flights of fancy, considers an alternative space where women look directly back and hold the gaze.

John Savoia

John Savoia is a Boston based photographer whose work focuses on continual documentation of his neighborhood and city at large, as well as attempts to compress long periods of time into still images.

These photographs are made by a process called solargraphy, where darkroom paper is exposed for extremely long periods of time. Using homemade pinhole cameras, these exposures last weeks, months, even years. The projected light of the sun melts the paper's emulsion, and each day the movement of the sun across the sky can be traced as it burns a latent negative image into the paper. These ephemeral photographs are scanned and inverted into a positive, during which the light of the scanner will fade the negative, essentially destroying the original. 

Amisha Kashyap

David Hiley

“The Three Graces – the daughters of Zeus – have inspired sculptors and artist from the Classical age to our own day. Hesiod tells us they represent Radiance, Joy, and Flowering. My series of variations began with a group of images taken in one context that I began to think of more conceptually. They became Three Graces over time as I elaborated them first with a simple triptych, then more abstractly in the second variation, and in this, the third variation, as part of a ‘secular altar piece’.”