Hannah Runnels – Staff Writer
Running through April 20, the exhibition “Capture” brings out of the darkness and into the light student work that was abandoned, forgotten and otherwise neglected.
With a December opening, the show is still on view at the Gary R. Libby Gallery, which is housed at the News-Journal Center off Beach Street. “Capture” was created at the request of local arts patron Gary Russell Libby, who for many years ran the Museum of Arts and Sciences and who is still renowned as a local arts patron, critic and curator.
Libbey first approached James Pearson, director of the Southeast Museum of Photography, desiring a student exhibition to be shared in the space named in his honor. Pearson, in turn, went to students Michele Meyers and Grant Wolf asking them to take on the responsibility of curating an exhibition with a single requirement — it had to be student work. Meyers and Wolf took the initiative of looking in the unlikeliest of places for the right photographs.
“I felt like we were digging for treasure,” said Meyers and they were.
Their first excavation site was the matte room in the photography building. At first, Wolf recalled, “I felt like we were digging through garbage, so many of them were forgotten prints folded in half.”
The two became fixated on former and older students’ work to see if there were any distinct conceptual differences. Some photographs they came across were brilliant and some were understandably terrible, even by student standards. For Wolf, the challenge was treating all the photos they unearthed with respect because, after all, they had been tossed in a dusty cabinet to be forgotten. In the end, they wondered why photographs with distinct rawness and soul were left behind.
After culling through thousands of prints, a connection was beginning to form as the exhibit was narrowed down to about 35 photographs.
“It’s amazing that a palette emerged after two months of dredging through art work,” Meyers said.
Pearson provided level-headed guidance and in the end, everyone found the outcome fascinating. What was once a certain student’s trash, now juxtaposed with other students’ work, rose to university thesis-level work. Most of the crowd attending the opening were unaware of the process that brought these photographs together and could find no difference in the overall quality of the individual work.
Libby and Pearson were both excited by the success of the exhibition and urge Wolf and Meyers to continue to seek opportunities to curate. The students are looking forward to pursuing similar ventures within the realm of museums and galleries.