Curator Ellen Jantzen says, "I chose as Honorable Mention Ellen Felsenthal’s “Appaloosa Snohomish, WA 2006” which evokes an equine landscape".

“In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete…”
Henry Beston, nature writer

Ellen Felsenthal says, "When I am close to these primal beings I am grounded, deeply connected to nature. They are a filter through which I experience the world.  Horses are no longer simply something inthe landscape, they are my landscape.  I am drawn to their form; the curves, the undulating lines, the myriad colors and patterns of their coats.  And it is through this lens that I view the world.   

I have developed this body of work over the course of two decades.  Animals have always provided me with a sense of purpose and belonging; with them I am complete.  As human beings remember the profound relationships between all living beings, our connection to the natural world is restored.

Bio:  

University of Texas, Austin:
BFA: Theatrical Design, 1990

BA: Studio Arts, 1992

BA: Art History, 1992

University of Washington, Seattle:

MFA: Photography, 1998

Currently living north of Seattle in a small, rural community.  Tenured faculty, teaching photography for 18 years at Everett Community College.  Dipping my toes back into the world of showing, after many years focused on teaching and building a non-profit organization.

Contact:  ellen@ellenfelsenthal.com
 

Curator Ellen Jantzen says, "I chose as Honorable Mention Beth Galton, “Entanglement” which speaks of memory in a very three-dimensional, sculptural way."

Beth Galton says of her series, 'Reminiscence', We tend to think of memories as the personal histories that define who we are, as if our brains physically transfer these memories from short- to long-term storage by encoding synapses with data from our lived experiences. However, one theory of long-term memory posits that, every time we consciously recall a memory, we actually create it anew. As I learned more about this theory of long-term memory, I began to question myself: Was I creating memories of my childhood from photographs?

Reminiscence is a collection of “memories” that I have self-consciously constructed as still lifes: some from experiences that I could previously recall and some that I could not.

In 2017, my mother and father—who had not lived together for 50 years by that point—died within three days of each other. After their deaths, I discovered objects from before, during, and after their marriage, including photographs that depicted scenes that I have no memory of.

In this series, I applied natural materials with these objects and photographs to make sense of my memories. This allowed me to see myself and my family in new ways. The botanicals that I have included function as admissions of my own hand in the creation of these scenes, and they serve as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of memory—an unstable and unreliable process.

Just as memory can transcend time and recombine in ways that allow us to cast new light on our lives, I have chosen objects from across time, thus recontextualizing mundane fragments. Through my tableaus, I acknowledge the unreliability of memory and attempt to display the interweaving network of events that we call “the past.”

Beth Galton, one of New York's top food and still-life photographers, graduated from Hiram College with a degree in studio art. Her attention to detail and strong sense of composition has allowed her to acquire a noteworthy client list including; Chipotle, Mott’s, Hellmann’s, Kraft Foods, Denny’s, MacDonald’s, and IHOP to name a few.
 Beth’s photographs have been published in many cookbooks and her work is exhibited periodically. 

She has received numerous awards from the Art Director’s Club, One Show, Creativity Show, Communications Arts, Graphics, the International Festival of NY, Lürzer’s Int’l Archive’s ‘200 Best Advertising Photographers, and PDN Taste Awards. Her "Cut Food” series received much press and awards around the world.

A prolific photographer, Beth has always had a practice of her own personal work. She recently turned her attention to showing this work, creating www.bethgaltonfineart.com and entering these images in shows across the country.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:

Shows:2018 Wave Hill-  Les Botaniques Vivants, Riverdale, NY
2018 The Center for Fine Art Photography - Illuminate Juried Exhibition,Fort Collins, 
2017 Center for Photographic Art - Internatinoal Juried Group Show, Carmel,CA
2017 The Fence 2017 - Juried Group Show - Traveling Exhibition
2017 Food: Paintings & Photography - Group Show, Beth Urdang Gallery,Boston, MA
2016 AP-SF Something Personal Exhibition - Group Show, San Francisco, CA
2015 Milano Art Week Ode to Food, Group Show Milan Italy 
2015 The Taste of Art – First Place, Boulder CO 
2015 McIninch Art Gallery, Discomfort Food, Manchester, New Hampshire 
2014 Aperture Summer Open Group Show, New York, NYPress:2015 Business Insider, People.com, Time.com, Washingtonpost.com, The Journal: Cut Food 
2015 E-Junkie: Artist of the Week 2014 Soura Magazine: Cut Food  
2014 MailOnline, Epicurious.com, Barn & Dining: Cut Food and Texture Series 
2013 Feature Shoot: Cut Food  2013 Online: GizModo, My Modern Met, Yahoo News, Buzz Feed, Trendland, ABC, Saveur, Design Taxi, MSN, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Daily News,Visualpotluck.com: Cut Food, Idiom, and Texture Series Awards:2017 APA National Editorial
2016 Communication Arts Excellence Award
2016 Graphis Photography Annual Two Gold Awards

www.bethgaltonfineart.com
 

Curator Ellen Jantzen says, "I chose as Honorable Mention Laura Noel’s 'A Geometry of Ginkos'. I love the mix of graphic elements with nature."
 
Laura Noel says, 'Crawling Backwards',
My family’s former home in tiny Griffin, Georgia, was like an enchanted kingdom, rooted in the American South but filled with rivers flowing outward, to anywhere I could imagine.  You might not even believe me when I tell you that the big house out on the 6th Street Extension was filled with butterflies carefully pinned in display cases, a Polar Bear rug, an Anaconda skin, poison blow darts and a shrunken head named Susie.

Every night my Grandmother and Great Aunt drank cocktails in their dressing gowns on matching sofas in the Bug Room, their name for the formal living room, that housed these amazing objects.

My sister and I crushed ice for their nightly highballs and basked in the exotica of the room. How did we get such treasure? My Great Aunt Constance met a wealthy inventor who hunted big game around the world and married him. The new couple moved to Griffin, where Constance's family had settled, after immigrating from Britain. The story is complicated, but when I was 12, we lost everything with Constance’s death.

Every precious object was sold at auction. These pictures capture my desire to crawl backwards into the childhood Eden that fate gifted me. This series, Crawling Backwards, refers to a kind of emotional, color-infused time travel – my metaphorical way of trying to return to a time when the world lay open before me, full of adventure and possibility. A time before I learned that life is sometimes dark and unfair. Today I can only see our house from the far side of a fence.

I use image making as a way to try and almost literally crawl backwards through time to visit this perfect pre-adult place. Reversing time is, of course, impossible. Photography makes me almost believe."

Laura Noel is a photographer, bookmaker and installation artist based in Atlanta. Noel’s work often explores different ways photography can be expressed as a transformational form of language, as well as aspects of her personal history. She was a 2015-2016 Walthall Fellow at the WonderRoot Arts Center and recipient of a 2016 Idea Capital Grant.

Her work is in the collection of The High Museum of Art, The George Eastman Museum, The Ogden Museum in New Orleans, North Carolina State’s Gregg Museum of Art and Design, MOCA GA and a number of private and public collections.She received a BA in Public Policy Studies from Duke University and a MFA in Photography with Distinction from the University of Georgia. Her prints been featured in exhibitions at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, the Contemporary American Photography exhibition at the Internationale Fototage Festival in Mannheim, Germany, Gallery 24 in Berlin, United Photo Industries in New York City, The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Davis Orton Gallery in upstate New York and Gallery 1401 in Philadelphia.

Her photographs have appeared on-line and in print in Photography Now, Hot Shoe (United Kingdom), Photography Quarterly, PHOTONEWS (Germany), Slate Magazine’s Behold Photo Blog, CNN Photo Blog, Lens Culture, Planet, Art News Daily, The Humble Arts Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, One One Thousand, South X Southeast, La Lettre de la Photographie, Conscientious, aCurator, Fraction Magazine and many others. In 2012, her All’s Fair series inaugurated Fall Line Press’ Free Fall series of quarterly magazines featuring the work of one photographer.

Recently, Scotland’s Aglu Books published Withdrawn, a study of discarded library books. Her artist books are in the collections of the International Center of Photography library in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Savannah College of Art Design’s ACA Library of artist books, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Cleveland Art Institute, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and many private collections. Recent installations include a commission, called Kaleidoscope, from Atlanta Celebrates Photography and the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority to convert a subway car into an art gallery, To Do at the Spruill Gallery, The Enchanted Forest of Books on the Atlanta Beltline,Give/Swap/Receive at Emory University, and The Empathy Experiment at ArtFields in the summer of 2017.

This fall, Noel will create two installations, When Will Tomorrow Come and Locked, Lost as part of an exhibition on refugee girls called Far From Home: Stories of Refugee Girls. Laura is the Associate Photo Editor of CARE USA.
Highlights of your career. 

Being collected by The Eastman Museum, The High Museum, The Ogden Museum in New Orleans and the Gregg Museum at North Carolina State University; having my work shown across the US, in China and Germany; being chosen for The Arctic Circle Residency.

www.amaterialwitness.com
noel photo@mindspring.com

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