MENU


HOME

ARTISTS

SUPPORTING ARTISTS

ABOUT US

HOW TO JOIN

BAS IN THE NEWS

BAS EVENTS

LINKS

MESSAGEBOARD

CONTACT

 

Renee O'Brien

Renee O'Brien's Artwork



Artist Statement

Renee Creager O'Brien is an artist and teacher, I have worked with a myriad of media including drawing, painting, traditional photography and digital technology. I became involved with pinhole photography in the early 1990s while teaching photography and doing graduate work at NYU. I was using the pinhole camera as a tool to demonstrate basic camera techniques and I was also researching historic photographic traditions. My experimentation with various alternative photographic methods necessitated large negatives and directed me back to the pinhole camera (a cheap substitute for a large format camera). At the same time, I was searching for a photographic medium that fulfilled a painterly aesthetic and an aura of process and authenticity. Pinhole photography was a way to move forward (or maybe backward).

The pinhole process, staged with an obscure viewing device and an unconventional allotment of time, is a photographic event that is both intuitive and contemplative. The serendipitous nature of pinhole often results in blurred, unclear photographs. The corporal surfaces depicted are not objective descriptions, but subjective renderings of time, experience, emotion, and thought. The selection of photographs for this exhibit represents an ongoing project that explores the yin and yang of places, streets, and community through a tiny pinhole. These images originated from a distressed 35mm Praktica converted to pinhole (lensless camera). The standard lens was removed and replaced with a piece of aluminum foil perforated with a small needlehole aperture or stenope (from the Greek, stenos, meaning narrow or confined). The black and white film was processed in a chemical darkroom and the negatives scanned and printed on  archival inkjet paper.

Dr. O’Brien completed her Ph.D. in Art Education with a dissertation on photography and aesthetics, The Post-Romantic Vision of Contemporary Pinhole Photographers. She is an Associate Professor of Communications and Media Arts at SUNY Adirondack Community College and a mentor for SUNY Empire State College, Center for Distance Learning.She lives in Hadley, New York with her husband Tom O'Brien, a renowned sculptor and pastel painter.

For more artwork:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~eed217/Erin/reneeobrien.htm
http://www.larac.org/Artist_of_Month/2007/Renee_Creager_Obrien.html