BRUG MANIA: PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIE ANNE WRIGHT AND EMERGE: MFA CANDIDATES AND GRADUATES AT PAGE BOND GALLERY, FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014.

The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Brug Mania: Photographs by Willie Anne Wright and Emerge: MFA Candidates and Graduates featuring work by Annie Albagli, Philip Hinge, Nick Irzyk, Harris Johnson, Aaron Koehn, Christine Navin, Lee Piechocki, Evan Pomerantz, Aaron Storck, and Grace Weaver. The Exhibition will be on view June 6 through July 3, 2014. A reception for the artists will take place Friday, June 6, 2014 from 6 to 8 PM

Willie Anne Wright, Lady With Clasped Hands, Lumen print, 20 x 16 inches

First trained as a painter, Willie Anne Wright has been practicing pinhole photography for over 40 years. Her ethereal, evocative images often combine disparate subjects and photography methods from the last 150 years. Much of her work draws inspiration from 19th century photographs and the continual interplay of past and present. “When I was a teenager,” she tells us, “an elderly relative gave me a series of five albumen prints of a group of young people enjoying a day in the country in the late 1880s. My father (who was 50 when I was born) was a young child looking on at his elders in several of the photographs. Something about the past and present being a continuum and even interfacing fascinated me.” The “lensless” technology of the pinhole is the oldest photography process; Leonardo described the principle of the camera obscura in his notebooks. Wright’s Brug Mania series incorporates another antique process: lumen printing, in which objects are laid on light-sensitive paper and printed by direct exposure to the sun. In this new body of work, she combines stunningly detailed lumen prints of the Brugmansia blossoms with pinhole photographs and images from her collection of anonymous vintage albums. In Willie Anne Wright’s work, time is not linear but circular; people and objects from different eras meet and coexist on the page. Past and present are given equal weight and are simultaneously made available to the viewer, and Wright seems to have the unique ability to access all of these moments at once.