"Specimen" now open at the Schick Art Gallery

The Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents Specimen, an exhibition of works by four photographers who share a commitment to deep investigation of their subject matter and a reverence for the stilled moment. Artists Carin Ingalsbe, Rosamond Purcell, Cheryle St. Onge and Andrea Wallace will participate in an artists’ talk at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, in the gallery. An opening reception will follow at 5 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.

In mid-October, Skidmore alumnus Jonathan Singer, founder and owner of Singer Editions, a fine art digital printing studio, will lead a gallery tour of the exhibition. The free event starts at 3 p.m. and is open to the public. All four photographers print in collaboration with Singer Editions, a fine art digital printing studio in Boston, MA.,

Carin Ingalsbe’s works are close studies of richly textured costumes from the archives of the New York City Ballet and other long-established ballet companies; the costumes range in age from the 1700s to the mid 1900s. Ingalsbe arranges a garment, shoots numerous photographs, and then puts the images together digitally so that details such as frayed or mended areas of fabric are not lost. While lush in color and surface, the costume’s wear and tear over time is central to her interest, and the resulting works speak eloquently of the passage of time.   

Ingalsbe is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She has been photographing vintage clothing and older objects for several years. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the country, and she is represented by Lanoue Gallery in Boston, Mass.

Rosamond Purcell is known for her photographs of natural history collections as well as found objects in various states of deterioration; she is sometimes referred to as the ‘doyenne of decay.’ In her works, birds, bones, or insects are often photographed in labeled boxes or jars of formaldehyde; she writes of being intrigued by museum classification and, in her words, “the gray area between the rational scientific system and human idiosyncrasies.” Her photographs convey the tension between human endeavors to organize nature and nature’s astonishing variety and subtlety, as well as the human desire to stop time and the inevitable processes of entropy.

Purcell’s photographs have been published in numerous books, including Finders, Keepers, a study of the natural history collections of the likes of Peter the Great and Lord Walter Rothschild. Purcell has shown her work extensively, including a solo exhibition at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2007. Her photographs are held in numerous collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Cheryle St. Onge’s series Natural Findings presents black and white photographs of subjects like frog eggs, dragonflies, or guppies, sometimes seen in captivity in a jar or being held by a person. The photographs are predominantly shot with an 8 x 10 view camera, imbuing them with remarkable clarity and a rich and luminous tonal palette. The resulting works evoke the sense of awe, attraction, and (sometimes) aversion of our early interactions with nature.

St. Onge received an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Mass. Her work has been widely exhibited, most notably at Princeton University,  Massachusetts College of Art, and Rick Wester Fine Arts. She has received numerous awards, among them a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Critical Mass Finalist Exhibition Award.

Andrea Wallace is interested in “how we define ourselves and are defined by our relationships with each other.” Photographs of herself, her son, and close friends are exquisite arrangements of color, light, and shadow, as well as documentations of a personal story that is both moving and enigmatic. They convey a sense of reverie and stillness, and feel both intimate and coolly objective, as if observed by an anthropologist engaged in research on a human family.

Wallace received an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She exhibits nationally and internationally, with numerous shows throughout the Americas, Europe, China and the Middle East. Her works are held in public collections at numerous institutions including the University of Texas at Austin and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

The exhibition continues at the Schick Art Gallery until Oct. 25. The gallery is located in the Saisselin Art Building; regular gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, and noon to 4 p.m. weekends. For more information, call 580-5049 or click here.