Also on display - Jo Whaley and Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

The current exhibit at photo-eye Gallery is Stories from Underground by Colette Campbell-Jones. Also in this exhibit in our "gallery artist" section is a selection of new work by Jo Whaley and husband and wife team Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek. I thought you would enjoy a little extra insight in the images that are hanging at the gallery.

Jo Whaley

Smerinthus Saliceti and Papilionidae -- Jo Whaley

Portraits of Transformation

For the Ancient Greeks, the word for butterfly was the same word for soul.

That word was Psyche, the root of our term psychology, as well as the name for the goddess of love in ancient Greece. The age-old mystery of death and transformation was linked to the metamorphosis which occurs when a caterpillar emerges from its cocoon as a stunningly beautiful butterfly. Ironically, the processes by which this transformation of the insect takes place is still unexplained by science.

One certainty is that a butterfly's life, like that of a human's, is short and fleeting.

Asterope Markii: Verson -- Jo Whaley

The photographs in this exhibition depict butterflies and moths paired with the portraits of anonymous individuals whose souls have long ago departed. In fact, the tintypes and glass plates that carry their visage show signs of decay, so that even the portraits themselves are disappearing with the passage of time. The result is the haunting melancholy of entropy, mixed with the exquisite perfection of the butterflies.

Science and art, mystery and fact are intertwined. -- Jo Whaley


View more of Jo Whaley's work here.




Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

Arc of Departure Diptych 09-1 -- Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

The Arc of Departure Diptych Series combines photogenic drawing, the process we have most recently been using, with cyanotype - another photographic printing process from the early beginnings of the medium. This territory – the realm of early formulas, recipes, and half-failed alchemical attempts at permanent imagery – is where we feel most at home. We see these diptych "tiles" as representatives of the visual language we have been using in the larger Arc of Departure prints – an alphabet of sorts – where individual elements stand alone, having been removed from their larger context. The cyanotype speaks of the cerebral in conjunction with and in contrast to the photogenic drawing, which results from the corporeal. This work is all about leaving the garden as we begin our last stages of working almost exclusively with photogenic drawing as the way by which we have been facilitators in the process of nature making images of itself. -- Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

Arc of Departure Diptych 09-4 -- Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

Arc of Departure -- Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek

View more of Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek's work here.



For more information about Carol Panaro-Smith & James Hajicek or Jo Whaley you can reach me by phone at 505-988-5152 x121 or by email at anne@photoeye.com.

Thank you!

--Anne Kelly, Associate Director, photo-eye Gallery