Mad Art Gallery proudly presents F3 a photography exhibit with work by Leah Oates, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Geoff Story. This exhibit opens on Friday, October 2, 2009, with a free opening reception from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. The exhibit continues through October 27, 2009. Gallery hours are by appointment Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.
Leah Oates
Leah Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and M.F.A from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oates currently resides and works in Brooklyn, New York. Oates has had solo shows at venues including Real Art Ways, A Taste of Art Gallery, Sara Nightingale Gallery and the Sol Mednick Gallery at the Philadelphia University of the Arts.
Oates' photographs are her response to sites and objects that are ignored, piles of trash, alleyways, overpasses, and abandoned structures. She shoots in working class and industrial areas. Raised in a working class area of New England, Oates has a familiarity and strong emotional connection with these locations. Oates' photographs capture the poignant beauty of these otherwise bleak locations. Oates' serious of double exposures play with ideas of time, of multiple memories, and how we reconstruct time and place. Blurring multiple moments and locations into one image, Oates captures the essence of place and time passing quickly.
Shawn Michelle Smith
Shawn Michelle Smith earned her B.A. from Stanford University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego. She is an Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Smith's work examines lynchings that occurred in the last decades of the ninetieth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Smith uses photographs of these lynchings and isolates women and girls in the crowds. She reduces these figures to heir minimal forms, making white silhouettes that recall the projections of nineteenth century phantasmagorias, spectacles of light and shadow that created ghostly apparitions. Smith's series plays upon and inverts the registers of black and white so powerfully set forth in Kara Walker's silhouettes and engages in a visual dialogue about white women and lynching elicited by Kerry James Marshall's Heirlooms and Accessories (2002).
Geoff Story
Geoff Story is an Associate Creative Director at TOKY Branding + Design. After hours, he enjoys exploring the unseen corners of his beloved city armed with whatever camera suits him at the moment. Geoff rarely shoots friends or family, relying on the kindness and willingness of strangers to be his subjects.
