Thesis 2008

Pete LePage, Eberhard Riedel, Cass Walker, Gina White, and Linda Wilson

On view: June 2 – July 7, 2008

Photographic Center Northwest presents the 2008 Thesis Exhibition, showcasing work by five graduating students from the Certificate Program. These graduating students each possess a style uniquely their own, but together they share a passion for fine art photography that has sustained them while they honed their skills through years of in-depth study. Please join us in recognizing the accomplishments of five insightful students & their bodies of work evolved from intense course of study and critique.

In Male Abstractions, Pete LePage gracefully explores the male figure as an abstract art form, rather than the traditional beefcake stereotype or as an object of lust. LePage looks for positions that the body flows through, instead of stopping at; not necessarily super flexible or well defined, just willing and able to move through a given point.

Eberhard Riedel was born in Germany at the beginning of World War II. His evocative portraits of people of eastern and southern Africa reflect his lifelong struggle with the human consequences of racism and genocide. Africa: Face to Face, explores our shared humanity and curiosity about self and other, acting as an immunization against fundamentalism and tribalism. Teaching photography to children in these areas of Africa, Riedel was able to better understand and gain the trust of the people he photographed.

In an adjunct show to Riedel’s thesis studies, PCNW displays additional work upstairs entitled: Cameras without Borders: An Exhibition of Photographs by African Children. The photographs in this exhibit were taken by children in Namibia, South Africa and Uganda as they explored their world through the lens of a camera. PCNW graduate and social worker, Eberhard Riedel, in Uganda with Canadian photographer Craig Richards, worked with groups of young people in difficult environments to raise curiosity and self-awareness through photography.

Normal American child of divorce, brother, and painter at 27 Bret Hart suffered a traumatic brain injury in 1993. This work by his sister, Cass Walker, documents their family’s gradual redefinition of a new norm, one achieved and sustained with quiet heroism and daily effort, in Making a New Normal.

The images in Evidence of the Moment, work by Gina White, evoke sensual elements of living in the now-awareness of the light, the moment and the relative stillness of that place.

In a revisiting of the places of her childhood in the Pacific northwest, Linda Wilson’s Coming of Age series evoke the moody landscape of youth and its’ inextricable tie to the environment which becomes the window of memory.