MY PLACE

Photograph Workshop

with Jim Dow & Cassandra Klos

Workshop for Beginners & Intermediate Photographers

August 10 – August 18, 2024 / BigTown Gallery, Rochester,

with special guests:

Virginia Beahan & Peter Moriarty

BigTown Projects is delighted to present its Pilot WORKSHOP/RESIDENCY Project with master photographers Jim Dow and Cassandra Klos.

WORKSHOP:

This workshop focuses on constructing visual meaning through photography, in this case about a place that is meaningful to you. That place can be physical, but it can also be metaphorical, even non existent. Subject matter is an extension of yourself, your interests, and your ideas.

How do you show such a place in photographs to someone who has never been there?

Participants will create a project that is self-reflective and not necessarily specifically descriptive. Moving quickly over ten days, a significant part of the experience will be a week of self-generated exploration using a phone or digital camera with technical instruction followed by three intensive days of in-person analysis and reflection. This process can mean many different things; at its core is the guidance to think through looking – employing images to convey meaning(s).

AUGUST 10th the workshop kicks off with a Zoom call for introductions and workshop preparation and culminates the following weekend AUGUST 16th - 18th in Rochester. The weekend segment immerses you in the history of photography, gaining skills looking and thinking about photography, receiving technical instruction, reviewing photographs, and preparing for the exhibition of all student work to be hung in the Projects Gallery space. Exhibition will be on view to the public for the duration of the American Geography exhibition until September 15th.

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY

Virginia Beahan & Jim Dow

Photographs from 1967 - 2024

July 4th – September 15th, 2024

Opening Reception Saturday, July 20th 4pm

Wood fired pizza in the garden

RSVP tickets

Join us for a very special evening of art, music, and celebration at BigTown Gallery. Following the opening of In Memoriam, Lex Brown and Samuel Beebe will premiere Carnelian, an original musical, as an intimate vocal-piano performance on the lawn.

Carnelian is an eclectic musical written by Lex Brown and co-composed by Samuel Beebe. In the course of a day, three mythical figures – Necyria, Bicyclus, and Orachrysops – await the imminent arrival of a cataclysmic event: the “Boom.” Throughout 8 songs, each character contends with their own definition of power, whether it be natural, political, technological, or spectacular. Carnelian sparks conversations about an unknown future, and finds humanity in the face of these existential threats.

Following the performance Brown and Beebe will host a brief Q&A about the work, which began as a film and will travel to the Celebration Barn Theater in Maine and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September as a full musical show with a live band.

This event is the first performance collaboration between BigTown Gallery and the 8th House Artist Residency program, where Brown was a resident in 2022.