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Silver Eye Announces Fellowship 2010 Winners Laura Heyman and Laura Bell

Award-winning Artists Exhibitions Open November 30, 2010 in Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH, Pa., – Silver Eye Center for Photography, the region’s premiere space for contemporary photography, is pleased to announce that Laura Heyman of Syracuse, NY, and Laura Bell of Girard, PA, are the winners of the Fellowship 2010 competition. They were selected by juror Deborah Klochko, Executive Director, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, from submissions by 258 artists representing 32 states and 12 foreign countries.

Laura Heyman is the recipient of the $3,500 International Fellowship for Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again, an ongoing series of portraits made in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, immediately before and after the January 12th earthquake. Laura Bell of Girard, Pennsylvania, is the first recipient of the $1,500 Keystone Fellowship, a newly-created award open to any photographer living in Pennsylvania. She was recognized for The Alba Series created while living in Edinburgh, Scotland, from 2008 to 2010.

“It quickly became clear to me that the work of Laura Heyman was very special,” said juror Deborah Klochko. “Powerful imagery that is well crafted, Heyman’s portraits are direct and straightforward. Laura Bell’s approach to photography is very different. Bell’s work, alternating between portraits, still lifes and landscapes, creates a visual narrative that invites us to create our own version of a larger story.”

Both artists’ work will both be on view at Silver Eye from November 30, 2010 through January 15, 2011. Silver Eye is open to the public, free of charge, and is located at 1015 East Carson Street in Pittsburgh’s South Side. The opening reception and artists’ talks will be held Friday, December 3, 2010, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Admission is free.

Laura Heyman, Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again
In 2009, Laura Heyman was invited to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, by artist-organizers of the Ghetto Biennale. There, she set up a simple, outdoor studio in the streets of the downtown neighborhood of Grande Rue. She photographed sitters against a plain cloth backdrop with an 8 x 10 camera. The portraits were then processed and printed in a makeshift darkroom so that each would receive their picture before the artist left the country.

“The life of these images was to be entirely determined by their subjects, potentially occupying a place of importance in the home, or as an exchange between loved ones,” said Heyman. Now, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the original context for viewing these portraits has again shifted. “In addition to whatever they were initially, the images are now a record and a memorial,” commented the artist. “Some of the people pictured here are living. Some are missing. Some are dead.”

Laura Bell, The Alba Series
Laura Bell’s The Alba Series takes its name from the Scottish Gaelic word for Scotland, the locus of and inspiration for this work created between 2008 and 2010. Bell accompanied her husband to Edinburgh while he worked towards an MFA degree. This was the first time Bell had ever left the United States and the process of adjustment to a new culture was both profoundly exhilarating and unsettling. The Alba Series references the dramatic landscapes, the culture and peoples of Scotland but at the heart of the work is how physical and emotional displacement leads to profound self-inquiry and acts of exceptional imagination.

ARTIST BIOS

Laura Heyman is an artist, curator and associate professor of photography in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1998. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as P.S. 122, New York; Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deutsches Polen-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany; Senko Studio, Viborg, Denmark; The National Portrait Gallery, London, England, and Light Work, Syracuse, New York.

Laura Bell received her BFA in film, video and photographic arts from The Cleveland Institute of Art, where she was awarded the Agnes Gund Traveling Scholarship and other grants for excellence in photography. She has exhibited at the JMC Center for Visual Arts and The Cleveland Foundation in Cleveland and at venues in Murray, Kentucky; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Sheffield, England

ABOUT SILVER EYE’S FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

This marks the 11th consecutive year of Silver Eye’s Fellowship program, which has now awarded $45,000 in unrestricted grants and solo exhibitions to 12 emerging and mid-career photographers. The program is an integral part of Silver Eye’s mission to directly support and provide encouragement to gifted and committed photographers from the region, the United States and abroad.

Silver Eye Center for Photography is the only non-profit organization in Pittsburgh and the region devoted exclusively to contemporary photography and related visual media. Founded in 1979, Silver Eye presents wide-ranging exhibitions by emerging and mid-career artists and has been a catalyst and advocate for new ideas, discourse and trends in the field.

Silver Eye Center for Photography is generously supported by our members and individual donors and by the Allegheny Regional Asset District, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Fine Foundation, The Grable Foundation, The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation.

IMAGES

(left)
Laura Heyman
Michel Lafleur, Ricardo Derival and Casseus Claudel, Grand Rue, March 2010
From the series Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again
Courtesy of the artist

(right)
Laura Bell
Floral and Insects, 2009
From The Alba Series
Courtesy of the artist

Silver Eye Center for Photography | 1015 East Carson Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15203 | 412-431-1810

silvereye.org

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