May 20 - June 9 2016

Jamie Casertano | Frank Mullaney | Christopher Turner | David Chick | Jennifer Moller

Grand Opening Reception: Friday, May 27, 6-9 pm.

Jamie Casertano

I've Been Here Before

“Photography, for me, is an ongoing visual exploration of the broad scope of emotion and experience. A determined attempt to get behind and beyond the ubiquitous smiles that greeted me whenever I lifted my camera during the early and formative years of my taking pictures. Most interesting to me are moments that are revealing and give glimpses of one’s inner world. Also, in observing objects, iconography and spaces as clues and metaphors. Understanding that the camera can often serve as a key of sorts to circumstances and settings that might otherwise be inaccessible or overlooked intensifies my desire to photograph them. Curiously I seek images that can be found in both the elusive dark corners and brightly lit stages of personality.

I’ve Been Here Before is a collection of photographs that consider the potent nature of nostalgia, recollection, intuition and the feelings these states of mind produce both pleasant and odious. Furthermore a visual study of forms and symbols that evoke memories, along with their varying implications, and the manner in which they are kept and displayed.”

Jamie Casertano was born on Christmas Day in Brooklyn, New York in 1972. His discovery of photography occurred as a curious child in his father’s basement darkroom. The urge to take photographs soon followed and later led him to study photography.

Beginning in New York City, and continuing presently in Provincetown, his work initially gravitated toward subculture, nightlife, and nonconformity. Drawn to a diverse array of subject matter, his photographs vary aesthetically from quiet to loud, veiled to brazen in content, and distant to intimate emotionally. He’s influenced and inspired by the works of Diane Arbus, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Yasumasa Morimura, and Martin Parr.

Casertano studied photography with Mark Asnin, among others, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has had two solo exhibitions at the A Gallery in Provincetown, and his photographs are in the collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, and the Provincetown Association and Museum (PAAM). His work has been published by Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Simon & Schuster.

Frank Mullaney

Wallpaper Saints

"The series, Wallpaper Saints, was inspired by the holy prayer cards I collected during my Catholic youth. As an altar boy, I used them to pray against the dawning awareness of my homosexuality. Yet the homoeroticism of many of the religious images only exacerbated my confusion, causing me to careen from shame to lust and back again. With this project, I’m photographing gay and trans men and women, each seemingly lost in a moment of transcendence. I’m working to reject the self-shaming associations I had with these religious images while simultaneously acknowledging their erotic charge.

The use of the word ‘saint’, for me, conjures up the pain and sometimes torment that gay people of my generation experienced growing up. Just as we emerged from the shadows to celebrate our sexual orientation, we, as a people, were faced with and often struck down by the AIDS epidemic. But the majority of the gay community, many of them ill themselves or in a cloud of incomprehensible grief, learned to forgo self-centeredness and to care for others, performing unheralded but necessary acts that ultimately would lead to a stronger, closer, more self-aware community."

Frank Mullaney was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1957 and moved to New York City in August of 1977, the same week Elvis Presley died and Son of Sam was apprehended.

Movies and photography shaped his early years and gave him a way to make sense of his world. He spent his weekends watching Hammer Studio horror films at the Capital Theater and picked up his first camera at nine years old, a Kodak 110 Instamatic. A year later he owned a Polaroid Swinger that he took with him everywhere.

In 2006 he began a formal education in photography at The International Center of Photography.

His work has been exhibited in New York City; Provincetown; Los Angeles; the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA; the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado; and numerous galleries in the Catskills.

He divides his time between Manhattan and Livingston Manor, NY.

Christopher Turner

Queer Elders

“I’m currently working on a series focusing on Queer Elders. I want to emphasize eldership in the sense of leadership and influence. This is the beginning of a series of portraits and video interviews of LGBT leaders, icons and elders—all over 60 years old. The interviews focus on each individual’s queer history. I feel it’s important to record the stories of those who were part of the LGBT rights movement and the sexual revolution. What was it like growing up queer in the 30’s, 40’s or 50’s? These subjects came of age in a time when homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness. My goal is to work with 40-60 elders for this series.

I chose to do a very straight-forward large format headshot for each subject. I want to show these individuals as heroic—not only for coming out when they did, but for being activists and leaders in the community. I feel these larger than life prints bring a sense of intimacy and shows the depth of these faces.

Most of my photographs tend towards a darker, more contrasted palette. It’s my goal to explore lightness and dark in the tones as well as the emotional content of my work. In addition to my portrait series I’m currently working on a series of long-exposure nighttime landscapes.”

Christopher Turner is an emerging artist who attended New York University where he received a B.A. in Art History and Psychology in '93. He is largely self-taught as a photographer. He has been doing portrait and landscape photography full-time for the past three years and part time for over 12 years. Prior taking on his preferred vocation full-time he was a web-developer.

Some of his landscapes were recently part of a group show with SLATE Art (Berkeley) and his nighttime landscape series is being shown by Poetica Art (San Francisco).

David Chick

Showgirls

David Chick is an artist, and a photographer, and has worked as an art director, stylist and costumer. He is a member of the Motion Pictures Costume Designers Guild.

He has attended Montserrat College of Visual Art, outside of Boston, where he originally studied as a painter, with no particular interest in photography. He then went on to further his studies at the Parsons School of Design in NY, studying in the Fashion Design program. He first began to use photography only as a medium for recording his paintings or to document the things that inspired him.

Upon his return to the Boston area, he pursued photography more seriously and studied at the New England School of Photography, while in Boston, he became an art director for local magazines, such as The Improper Bostonian. With his varied interests and his passion for learning he continued his study of painting abroad, at The Florence Academy of Art, in Florence Italy, and then at UCLA, in Los Angeles.

Originally from Boston, he has made his home in New York City and Los Angeles. Chick washed ashore in Provincetown, during the summer of 2011, and has spent the past five summers here, where he began showing his work in the local galleries. His talent for drawing and painting allowed him to become the featured artist for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in 2014, creating illustrative works that featured literary giant Tennessee Williams and his circle of writer friends. He began exhibiting at the AMP gallery three summers ago, with his photographs of Warhol Superstar, Holly Woodlawn.

Chick has a thorough enjoyment for life, and a passion for learning and creating, he is inspired by life itself…his questioning of, and perhaps a search for a deeper meaning of…and despite his sly sense of irony and humor, Chick’s work is imbued with a sense of where his curiosity leads him, and not without a personal connection to his subjects, most of which are friends or persons known to him on some level…artists, writers, actors, personal heroes

"As a child, I was always inspired by color and light, escaping through television and watching cartoons and the razzle-dazzle of old Hollywood films. Like Alice in the looking glass, I always felt myself believing so hard in what I was watching that I wanted to fall into the movie, to be a part of the action and to be carried away through the story, and to this day I still do, I want to create, and to make pictures and artworks that speak to the viewer, that tell stories, and to allow the viewer entrance into my very own world, that’s when I feel that I am most effective, by creating a picture that jumps out at you but that also pulls you in..."

Jennifer Moller

Black Pool, 2/21/2013, 9:04am

“The pools were formed at the end of the last ice age, approximately 14,000 – 17,000 years ago as the Laurentide ice shelf retreated and left behind kettle holes to be later filled by rising tides and ground water.

The high tide can rise from sea level (0.0) up to 12.4’ over the course of six hours, and then drain away to sea level again over another six hours. Moon gravity creates the high tides, as water pulls away from the earth toward the moon. On ground, I watch a terrapin turtle emerge from the mud and ancient horseshoe crabs mate on low tide flats in spring. No matter what time of year the sound of the marsh is marked by the high piercing call of the marsh hawk.

I set the camera to film a time-lapse in six-hour intervals as I walk the marsh; in winter I see many dolphin corpses and seagulls too. Their forms are clearly visible, a break of the flat horizon line, mounds of flesh later to be taken by tides, claws and hungry beaks.

The pools are a place of incubation and feeding, a mighty plenitude of nourishment, providing for new life. I watch a fox in fall, easily camouflaged under an overcast sky, searching for food in the rusty marsh grasses. In the summer and early spring, I see mussels lodged into the inner perimeter of the pools’ walls. Salt water is heavier than fresh water and sinks to the bottom. So I am looking through two lenses, the fresh water lens reveals a multitude of life beneath - microscopic organisms, spawning fish, snails, and crabs.

My camera is a tool for marking time and five years is a short period in the lives of ancient kettle holes. I am watching this natural interconnectedness and taking it for evidence of how the spiritual world permeates the mundane. The dynamic weather and moving tides contrast with these persistent forms, and this beautiful interplay has moved me to record these pools over the course of many years.”

Jennifer Moller is an interdisciplinary artist and lives, works and teaches in both traditional and digital mediums. Her early interest in drawing continues to inspire to this day. While working for hire as a photographer and videographer, she has continued to develop personal imagery and exhibit drawing, and media work. She also has created community-based artwork involving installation, video projection and public participation. Her video installation work “seas” is in the permanent collection of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth University.

After graduating from Maine College of Art in 2003 in studio arts, Moller started teaching as an adjunct professor at the Art Institute of Boston. There she taught in three departments: Illustration, Animation and Foundation. Working as an arts educator, Moller has been able to share her knowledge, including the creative use of digital tools, illustration concepts, and photographic strategies.

Moller has received awards for her work including the press women photography award and an MCC grant in film and video in 2005, and Wellfleet Cultural Council grant in 2014. Other notable honors include an invitation to teach as an Artist in Residence in the New Media Department, at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a semester year visit in 2010.

To learn more go to her website: www.jennifermoller.com.