A photo of the artist’s hand holding her own photo postcard of the Chemung River over top of her iPad screen showing her hand holding the same postcard at the original location.
10″x13″; digital photo. Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Elmira College Art Faculty Exhibition
at the George Waters Gallery in Elmira, New York
13 March-5 April 2025
Elmira College Faculty Member Jan Kather’s series “Reframing the Chemung” is on view as part of the 2025 Elmira College Art Faculty Exhibition. “Reframing the Chemung” is an installation that began with an exploration of the technique called in-camera collage. Inspired by a her participation in Kolaj Institute’s Photography and Collage Virtual Residency in July 2024, Kather re-defined her thoughts about what a collage could be, expanding her ideas from simply pasting physical, disparate parts together to create a new image, to virtually gluing parts together, using the camera lens (or scanner bed). Additionally, she experimented with “Locative Collage” (photographing on location) to revisit scenes along the Lackawanna Trail with her own archive of old images. The theme morphed into a textile based research project about the Chemung River Valley, discovering layers of “hidden” history. Long before European settlers came to the area, the First Peoples–the Haudenosaunee–lived here. The “Valley of the Horses’ Heads” is known today as Horseheads, and the Chemung River/Lackawanna Railroad Bicycle Trail follows what indigenous people called “The Forbidden Path”.
20″x16″; digital print of an in-camera collage. Courtesy of the artist.
Three in-camera collages are also part of the installation, as they were the first explorations Kather undertook as part of Kolaj Institute’s Photography & Collage Virtual Residency. Their assignment was to make a collage that would evoke a word. Kather chose the word “confused” as her inspiration, and created the profile of a woman with a crumpled up paper “brain” that she then photographed (glued). From that matrix, she recolored several versions, sent the files to Snapfish to be made into puzzles, and finally, mixed the two puzzle pieces together to create even more confusion. Simply put, they became: Puzzled, Confused, and Mixed Up. Little did the artist know how much that could describe the political scene today.
Jan Kather’s works, Reframing the Lackawanna Trail and Reframing the Lackawanna Trail Railroad Bridge, were exhibited as part of “Camera and Collage” at Kolaj Institute Gallery, 29 November 2024-25 January 2025, as part of PhotoNOLA 2024.
(text adapted from material provided by the artist)
INFORMATION
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