Karen Graffeo – Re:re:fwd:Forward

Fotografie Lenticolari di Karen Graffeo e Composizioni Musicali di Rusty Banks.

Comunicato stampa

The SACI Gallery is proud to present an installation by Karen Graffeo, associater professor of photography at the University of Montevallo, and composer Rusty Banks, instructor of music at Millersville University.

The exhibition presents recent lenticular photographs by Karen Graffeo. The lenticular photographic process is a three- dimensional layering that allows the photograph to be experienced as motion, or a brief animation. The photographs in this exhibition merge images of landscape, sky, water, and human forms.

Karen Graffeo has photographed images of light, and night, land and water from travels in Italian villages, Romania, New Mexico, and Turkey. The photographic text installation presents the impact of journey: the journey of light and dark across the land, and the impact of the journey of human spirit and mortality.

The photo/text installation merges land, sky, night, day, and figurative images as a visual inventory of awe, wonder, and mystery: the gifts of aging. The gallery installation includes video, text and lenticular photographs to celebrate the sacred aspects of journey, particularly the journey of aging.

Karen Graffeo is an active multi-media artist creating work in both experimental and documentary photography including an 8 year long term photo/essay documentation of Roma (Gypsy) refugee encampments in Europe. She also does performance and installation based works. She has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions, including a teaching and installation residency at Ulster Art Academy in Belfast Northern Ireland and a lecture and exhibition that opened March 2007 at SACI University in Florence, Italy. She has toured the continuing documentary exhibition “Let Us Now Praise the Rom” i.e. (Gypsy) in Paris, Italy, Romania, and in Ithaca, New York. . She has lectured about Roma groups that have been forced to relocate due to dire humanitarian conditions and political turmoil. In November of 2005 her work was presented at Miami Basel Art Fair by New York curator Franklin Sirmans for his exhibition and presentation about photographers and self portraiture. Her work is included in public collections, private collections, nationally and internationally and in past gallery representations in Japan, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Ireland, and Birmingham.

Karen Graffeo’s work has been published in the following: Aperture Magazine, Contemporary Southern Photographers, July 1989 issue: Number Magazine, The Seven Virtues of Photography, Spring 1990; Black and White, An Australian journal of contemporary figurative photography, Fall 1997; in the book edited by Nelson Blancourt Visions of Angels published in 1996 by S Editions of Smithmark Publishers; in the book Our Grandmothers published in 1998 by Stewart, Tabori and Chang; and in numerous literary journals and web based publications.

At the University of Montevallo, Karen Graffeo has received the University Scholar Award in 2005 for her current photographic project documenting life in Roma refugee encampments in Europe. She has visited Roma encampments in Romania, France, and Italy to document conditions for Roma that have had to relocate due to humanitarian conditions or political turmoil. She has organized sewing projects for Roma women and girls in camp Poderaccio in Florence, Italy.

Karen Graffeo has organized a performance art collective that includes emerging artists, professional artists and students. Her performance work received 2 fellowships from the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans in 1993 and in 1989.