-September 4 to September 29, 2024

Reception, Thursday, September 5, 2024, 6PM to 8PM

-Un Conte en Suisse, Eric Franceschi

 "... the authentic time machine only works when we return to the highlights of our distant past that still resonate so deeply that we are sucked out of our shoes towards the emotional content that still permeates these places." Jim Harrison, "Westward Ho" in I Forgot to Go to Spain   I was 7 went I took my first photograph with a small black bakelite camera, a gift from my aunt Marguerite. A colour shot of a blurry boat on Lake Geneva. I was almost 57 when I decided to finally pay a contemporary photographic tribute to this Vaud Riviera that I never stopped visiting since my earliest years. It is the story of a unique place, nestled between Vevey and Montreux, inhabited by my family and my memories. The Riviera of Vaud.   "He had retired to Switzerland. He dwelt in a sort of tall hovel on the banks of Lake Geneva. He had chosen his dwelling in the most rugged nook of the lake, between Chillon, where the dungeon of Bonnivard is, and Vevey, where Ludlow is buried. The stern Alps, filled with twilight, winds, and clouds, wrapped around him; and he lived there, hidden in the great shadows that fall from the mountains." Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs.

-Chernobyl, Pierpaolo Mittica

On 26 April 1986, at 1:24 a.m., the worst technological catastrophe of the modern era occurred, affecting the lives of millions of people. That night, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The explosion released tons of radioactive dust into the air, which, carried by the winds, contaminated both hemispheres of the planet, settling wherever it rained. Almost all of Europe was contaminated: sixty-five million people were affected. Today, nine million people in Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia continue to live in areas with very high levels of radioactivity and consume contaminated food and water. It is estimated that the most contaminated areas stretching over 260.000 square kilometers of land, (almost as large as Italy) will return to normal radioactive levels in about one hundred thousand years time.   Eighty per cent of the population of Belarus, western Russia and northern Ukraine suffer from numerous radiation-related illnesses. After the Chernobyl accident, an exclusion zone was created around the nuclear power plant with a radius of thirty kilometers. All inhabitants of the area were evacuated. But the area that was supposed to be an exclusion and dead zone never was. There is a lot of life in the area and today more than 4000 people are part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone community. The photographer, Pierpaolo Mittica spent six years documenting the life inside and outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, covering also stories that were never documented before.

-October 2 to October 27, 2024

Reception, Thursday, October 3, 2024, 6PM to 9PM

-Men and Giants (Des hommes et des géants): Bertrand Desprez

Men and giants   They dance under the skirts of their giants, observing the world through a small opening, these balancing carriers play with gravity. Whirling in the heart of the crowd captivated by these immense characters straight from the past. Giant bearers appear with the creation of giants. This is a real challenge when we know that giants can weigh up to 130 kilos. Each giant is accompanied by its group of carriers who take turns to move it forward or dance. In the 19th century, porters were recruited from working-class circles. The Gayant de Douai (the largest) was created in 1530 by the corporation of basket makers. Giants appear in urban religious processions in Western European cities from the end of the 14th century or the beginning of the 15th century. Founding giant, warrior or representative of a small trade, animal or marginal, giants of the mine or the coast, giant of Flanders Their mysterious origins lead to daydreaming. Because these wicker bellies make young and old dream, they exorcise sorrows and torments, with the support, sometimes of a colorful escort. There are nearly 300 of them in the Hauts de France region. Out of the workshops of giant factors, a profession in danger of disappearing. Basket makers and moulders, they work with wicker for the structure and molding for the head. Magical and spectacular, the Giants symbolize the soul of a city united in the same jubilation, each one considering the Giants with the tenderness that we devote to our ancestors, the common part of a long history. Childhood games are not far away, a form of freedom during a procession or a carnival. We make faces, we hide, we play at scaring each other. I was born on July 9, Gayant's feast day in Douai in Hauts de France. On my third birthday, I was sick and my grandmother managed to bring the Gayants over to dance in front of her window. Men and giants is a bit of my story.

-Portraits: Fred Beaujeu-Dufour

Fred Beaujeu-Dufour is a French American photographer based out of Clinton, a small town in eastern North Carolina. He specializes in environmental portraiture. Always walking with either his digital or medium format camera, he stops people and asks them if he can take their portraits. This body of work is an example of his work over the last five years.

-November 6 to December 22, 2024

Reception, Thursday, November 7, 2024, 6PM to 8PM

-Transcending Perspectives: Journey in Times, Parsons School of Design, The New School

The artists in this exhibition unveil visions that reside in the realm of the extraordinary. Their works subtly emerge, as if from the periphery of our vision, beckoning insistently for our undivided attention and discerning gaze. Brought into the sharp relief of clarity, these images unfold their once veiled meanings. They reside in a space that is both known and otherworldly, straddling the line between the familiar and the foreign. These photographs dwell in the ambiguous terrain that blurs reality and imagination, consciousness, and dreams, charting a course through the overtly known to the covert, the suppressed, or the intimately dreamt to reveal certain truths. This exhibition was curated from current students, recent alumni and faculty from the MFA Photography Program at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

-Parsons School of Design, The New School  

A pioneer in art and design education for more than a century, Parsons School of Design is one of the most prestigious and comprehensive colleges of art and design in the world. Critical thinking, collaboration, and reflective practice are at the heart of a Parsons education. Located in the heart of New York City, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of design disciplines. A student-centered curriculum allows for both focused and interdisciplinary learning to master concepts, technologies, and research methods that cut across a wide array of fields. By synthesizing theory with craft, and combining art and design studies with the liberal arts and business, Parsons prepares its students to shape scholarship in their field and make art and design that matters. Its faculty of notable artists, design practitioners, critics, historians, writers, and scholars exemplifies an extraordinary breadth of vision.   The graduate Photography program functions as a 21st-century studio and think tank. The goal of the 26-month program is to prepare graduates to define the creative role of photography within contemporary culture, as practicing artists and scholars. Challenging participants to move beyond current paradigms—to anticipate and set trends, rather than follow them. A rigorous critique process and regular meetings with faculty, professional artists, and visiting critics help students develop individual points of view and situate themselves and their work within larger historical, theoretical, and contemporary visual contexts.     The BFA in Photography program offers students the opportunity to create multiple bodies of work. Students are challenged both technically and conceptually as they develop their skills through the exploration of analog and digital technology. The goal is to provide students with the visual, technical, conceptual, and professional vocabulary necessary to succeed in their field. Students sharpen their focus by pursuing a specific concentration, gaining technical mastery and deep knowledge of their area of interest. Concentrations include Fashion, Fine Art, Social Documentary, Commercial/Editorial and Photographic Technologies.

-Marko Risovic: Last Day of School

Last day of school is a narrative dealing with the issue of depopulation in the Balkans, structured through insight into intimate spaces of young people growing up in this region.  The identification of a problem of such a magnitude starts in abandoned and dilapidated schools, where there are still traces of life struggling to survive with persistence and firmness of a flower on a rock, but also with its vulnerability.

-January 8 to February 2, 2025

-Michael Alvis, Hidden in Plain Sight, Roadside Attractions

Many people have the goal of photographing beautiful iconic places that they’ve seen in travel guidebooks, on social media, or printed in coffee table books. I, too, have been guilty of making such photographs, but I prefer to explore the back roads, avoid the obvious, investigate narrow alleys, in order to uncover things that are overlooked, forgotten, and even unappealing to some people. I find a certain “wabi-sabi” beauty in the mishmash, hodgepodge, and confused jumble of things decorating decayed walls and neglected buildings. I’m talking about the kind of visual clutter a person typically avoids at all costs in a photograph because it would detract from a stereotypical or clichéd postcard image. What is unsightly to some viewers may appeal to other people in a completely different light. There can also be beauty in the decay of places and the “accidental art” that is discovered; I hope these images draw you in to observe what you weren’t expecting. This exhibition is a small sample of photographs made in Japan & the USA from my long-term Roadsides Attraction series.

-May 31 to July 31, 2025

-Eyes on Wilson, the Indoor Residency Exhibition

The indoor residency exhibition will consist of roughly 400 photographs shot by 68 photographers from 18 different countries. This will be the ultimate residency exhibition as the whole 11th edition will be made of 500 photographs in total. This will be a time capsule made between 2027 and 2024 showing how Historic Downtown Wilson has evolved through the years and is now ready for a whole new chapter.

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