Thesis Exhibition 2013

Daniel Hawkins, Chris Letcher &
Patrick Names

On view: June 3 – July 15, 2013

Reception, Graduation & Talks: Thursday, June 13, 6-9 PM

Every year the Photo Center celebrates the graduates of the Certificate in Fine Art Photography program through a comprehensive exhibition of their thesis work. These works not only mark the culmination of a year’s worth of artistic practice but they also represent a new generation of Seattle-based artists.

Chris Letcher’s Con(Structure) explores photographic abstraction, riding the tension between what is perceived and its relation to the world. Letcher captures the variations of change, suspending the viewers between documentary and abstract reading of images. He seeks to give the viewer an experience that challenges their perception about what things “are” before they become defined or closed in specific meaning.

For The Water Project Daniel Hawkins has been traveling to locations around our region where the water meets up with our urban environment. He then shoots the location using an 8×10 camera and develops the film in the water from that location. This is either done on site using repurposed processing tubes or back in his personal darkroom. The resulting images range from unrecognizable swatches of color to images that are only slightly shifted. By working in this way the artist hopes to allow the materials from these specific sites to have an influence on the resulting images beyond the traditional light – lens – film relationship.

Keepsakes is a self documentation about facing the fear of reliving the life of a father lost and redefining memories of a man robbed of life by Parkinson’s Disease. Patrick Names’s investigation into the life of his late father lead him to discover many different artifacts (pictures, books, journals, etc.) that were hidden away in boxes, forgotten about in a storage unit. By releasing a lifetime of these memories, Names has been able to redefine the presence that his father has in his own life. Using both black and white and color images, Names creates a photographic narrative about the process of uncovering these memories and captures the profound range of emotions that it brings to the surface.

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