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The Lycoming College Art Gallery will unveil a new exhibit this spring entitled “Everything Changes Everything,” featuring the works of Anne Arden McDonald. The show opens on Wednesday, March 4, 4-9 p.m., with an artist’s talk slated for 5:30 p.m. The exhibit runs through April 9, and is free and open to the public.
A Brooklyn-based artist born in Atlanta, Ga., McDonald made self-portraits from the age of 15 to 30 by building installations in abandoned interiors and performing privately for her camera in these spaces. Recently, she has been using light and chemistry — the way a painter or sculptor would — to build images on photographic paper.
“While most photography employs a lens, and either film or a digital sensor, this series explores ways of generating images on photographic paper without using a camera or negative,” said McDonald. “The source of inspiration for inventing processes that inform the resulting photograph is the dialogue that occurs between painters or sculptors, and their chosen medium. Another is the scientific method, where you observe phenomena, formulate a hypothesis, test it with experiments, use careful measurements, note variables, observe results, and use this information to build an image.”
In the past 30 years, McDonald has presented 44 solo exhibitions in 10 countries. She has been published in Aperture, European Photography, and Eyemazing magazines. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Worchester Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, and Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale. She was a Lapine Fellow at the Millay Colony and received a grant of studio space from the Sharpe Foundation. She was also in residence at the Byrdcliffe colony from 2015-2017 and taught for six years at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her lectures included topics such as staged photography, self-portraiture, Czech and Slovak photography, alternative photography, and her own work.
“Photography is a very young and exciting medium, and there is so much undiscovered terrain,” added McDonald. “In some ways, it stands at a precipice: digital photography is eroding the availability of some analog materials, and the study and use of silver gelatin papers. I am working to develop these processes, and to pose interesting questions about what photography is, and what it can be.”
The Lycoming College Art Gallery, located in downtown Williamsport at 25 W. Fourth St., contributes to the city’s arts culture and allows the College to become more involved with the surrounding community. Lycoming art students have the opportunity to interact with visiting artists and learn first-hand the inner workings of an art gallery.
The gallery is open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 4 – 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. and 5 – 9 p.m.; and on First Fridays, 4-9 p.m., during exhibitions. For more information, please visit the gallery online at: https://www.lycoming.edu/art/gallery.html or send an email to dirocco@lycoming.edu.