Exhibition
Considering Possibilities moves the viewer through the intentional mystical imagery of Elizabeth’s photography that breaks the realism of photography to the moods only available through the magic of experimental and alternative photographic processes.
Ryan Gallery presents a collection of prints by Elizabeth Opalenik with Mordançage work also found in her book Poetic Grace, the never exhibited platinum print series from her personal experiences A Journey Home, and a collection carbon prints created using the same negatives from her Mordançage prints.
Elizabeth will join us for the opening reception on July 16 from 5pm to 8pm, and on Friday July 15 at 7pm she will give a talk about her art and experiences as a photographer.
About Elizabeth
Elizabeth spun a map on a lazy-susan in 1968 and left home to the sound of peace marches and her mother saying, “I knew you were different from the time you were two.” She discovered photography as a metaphor for life in 1979 at the Maine Photographic Workshops and discovered passion and possibilities in Provence in 1983 where she later began her evolution as a Mordançeuse. Traveling through six continents, camera in hand, she connects life’s possibilities through teaching workshops, humanitarian projects and making art.
“I am a photographic artist, educator and freelance photographer traveling the world with my camera and I love it. Philanthropic projects keep me grounded and connected universally.
I believe that all good photographs are self portraits and know that my many former lives manifest themselves in my images. My heart is still in my darkroom working in the Mordançage process, but I use today’s technology when appropriate to explore all the creative paths.
My photographs are collected and published internationally and all work is for sale. Mordançage images are unique, others are silver gelatin, platinum, hand painted or digitally printed in very limited editions on beautiful handmade papers.”
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the Light Sensitive artist reception! We enjoyed seeing many familiar faces, as well as many brand new ones sharing their work in our galleries for the first time.
It was a night filled with many exciting conversations discussing the variety of alternative processes used to create the work in this exhibition!
Have you ever held a platinum print of a beautiful image? It’s amazing how printing in a handmade process turns a that image into an object of art that can be seen by many and handed down to future generations. I first experienced this excitement many years ago when I held in my own hands a 1934 platinum print hand-printed by Edward Weston, and I have been hooked ever since.
From the initial concept of Art Intersection through today, I have been determined to design and create a space for learning, creating, and exhibiting physical pieces. I know first-hand how viewing a print brings a more powerful and positive experience to the viewer than seeing a facsimile on the computer or tablet screen.
Digital negatives on our light table
The community of artists working in Art Intersection’s Photographic Arts Lab have access to three centuries of imaging technologies from darkroom to digital, including the new use of digital negatives to take our digital files from the phone or DSLR into the darkroom to create gelatin silver, platinum, cyanotype, tintype, or photogravure prints. I’m excited we can provide all the toolsto create contemporary work in almost any current or historical process.
News flash, we’ve added a new tool in the Photographic Arts Lab to bridge past centuries of photography (we build bridges, not walls). Last week an M.M. Kelton and Sons 1870 intaglio press arrived in the lab to create photogravure prints! See a press just like ours in action here.
Michael T. Puff discusses finished prints
If you are excited to make a print from your digital or film image, come by and see what’s available to help you realize your vision. Watching people create prints at Art Intersection allows me to continue enjoying, seeing, and maybe holding, beautiful prints from our image making community (eat your heart out Edward Weston).
This past Saturday, January 9, we hosted a Walk and Talk with Jonah Calinawan, Karen Hymer, Amy Rockett-Todd, and Rebecca Sexton Larson, all featured in (re)View: Explorations in Human Nature. We were so pleased that the artists could travel to Gilbert from around the country to celebrate the exhibition with us!
Amy Rockett-Todd gets personal while talking about her albumen plates
Rebecca Sexton-Larson discusses her work and the bromoil process she uses
Karen Hymer explains that her photogravures draw on the idea that beauty is not only for the young
Jonah Calinawan discusses his fantasy-inspired cyanotype self-portraits
A closing reception for both (re)View and Next Level followed the Walk and Talk. It was great to see the artists among their exhibited work and meet so many of their friends and family! Thank you to everyone that came out!
Starting Friday evening and working through Sunday, the workshop students learned about creating digital negatives for platinum/palladium, chemistry, and then made prints in the alt process lab.
Keith shared his expertise with the class and showed the process he uses to make palladium and platinum prints. You may remember Keith’s work on exhibit in the North Gallery along with Dick Arentz this past January and February during the Art Intersection Platinum/Palladium exhibition.
Checking the first digital negatives for densities and checking exposure times.
Keith concentrating on building and explaining digital negatives and Quad Tone RIP.
Discussing paper choices.
Ready to print.
Coating Arches Platine with a glass rod.
Time to expose.
High tech or low tech, it’s all about UV light.
Pouring on the developer.
Trying the cold tone developer.
Clearing.
In the final wash.
Final prints drying before going to the critique wall.
Some of the dry prints on the critique wall. Others were still too wet to show by the end of the workshop.
Have you ever wanted an enlarged negative for your alternative photographic process art? Does the process to create a digital negative adjustment curve sound too complicated? If you answered yes, then join us for a presentation on creating a digital negative curve. As my kids said when they needed help with their homework, just give me the answer without all the boring technical stuff.
This lecture illustrates creating a Photoshop curve to adjust a digital camera image to make a digital negative suitable for contact printing a gelatin silver (black and white) print. This same process can be followed for any alternative photographic processes that use a negative.
Art Intersection will create curves in advance of our alternative process workshops and make these available to the students. Now, before our workshops, you can use our digital lab to make digital negatives from your digital cameras (yes, even from your phone’s camera) or scanned films.
Beautiful and creative images were made this weekend using hand coated printing out paper. Friday night Siegfried gave a lecture, followed by two days of making prints using Printing Out Paper.
This past Saturday and Sunday were filled with mixing, coating, exposing, clearing, and toning.
Amazing results and sometimes surprises along the way of creating images with Colloide-Chloride Printing out Paper, PoP, in a workshop led by Siegfried Rempel. Once a popular commercial method to create images, today we hand coat paper to bring this process back to life and make beautiful, crisp, warm toned images.
We broke into a verse of Love Potion Number 9; “mix it up right here in sink, smells like turpentine, and looks like india ink.”
The use of Collodion in photography for the production of photographic prints an be found as early as the 1850s. The concept of an “emulsion” of silver salts in a collodion binder was introduced by Gaudin in 1853 and by 1861 he was actively producing the “Photogene” collodion emulsion. The collodio-chloride print-out-process represents one of the last PoP processes popular in North America and Europe with commercial photographers from the 1880s until WW II.
The Collodio-Chloride emulsion is coated on paper and the resulting image, contact printed under bright daylight, remains in the collodion layer. The process requires exposure under bright daylight and the image darkens or “prints out” during exposure.
Chris made a 4″ x 5″ glass plate negative using the PoP coating.
The over-exposed image is then processed to stabilize the image and provide the final print image, hence the term print-out-paper.
The collodion held together under processing to allow photo transfer.
A little dichromate for bleaching.
Final toning bath for a PoP image with a “platinum” look.
This workshop is another in the series of alternative process photography learn and create workshops at Art Intersection. In the past one-and-a-half years we have offered these alt-process workshops and demonstrations.
Cyanotype
VanDyke
Gum over Platinum
Albumen
Daguerreotype
Salt Prints
Stay tuned on our website and emails for more learn and create in the darkroom workshops.
