Katherine Westerhout - Guest Artist

Oakland photographer, Katherine Westerhout, will debut four images from her documentation of the King’s Park and Pilgrim Psychiatric Centers. Built in the1880's, the two medical centers were built near Smithtown on Long Island, New York, to accept mentally ill in-patients primarily from New York City. King's Park and Pilgrim Psychiatric Centers, initially referred to as "lunatic asylums," became the largest such facilities in the world. Once described as "veritable cities for the insane," these hospitals were eventually phased out in favor of other treatment modalities (a euphemism for what many view as abject neglect), and with the exception of limited patient services, closed in the mid 1990's. The photographs featured in this series were made at the abandoned King's Park and Pilgrim mental hospitals in early April of 2004. The four images to be exhibited at ACCI have not been shown in the Bay Area and are new prints from Westerhout’s collaboration with Trillium Press, Brisbane.

Westerhout captures the ghosts of the past in these images by transforming the interiors of these buildings into cathedral-like structures through the manipulation of her exposures. The light she captures is alive.

Kate Kerrigan

I like capturing moments in time, focusing primarily on urban landscapes. I am constantly looking at my surroundings in terms of frames and composition and really see beauty in the simplicity and everydayness of life. My eye is naturally drawn to symmetry and repetition. I love capturing shadows, reflections and silhouettes and shooting in adverse gloomy conditions. All of which create a certain melancholy, pensive mood that I seem to be drawn to.

Scott Lefferts

At its most basic, photography is nothing but the recording of light and dark. But there is something special about those images that take contrast to the extreme. Sunrises and sunsets, silhouettes, city streets at night, all seem iconic because they are changed from their usual crowded, noisy, dirty complexity to simple shapes and shadows. I have always been fascinated by images that capture the edge of darkness; light sneaking into dark corners, or bleeding out of the world. I hope you enjoy my images that explore this twilight.

To view more of my images, visit www.SLPhotography.com

Stephanie Gene Morgan - Guest Artist

"I am most interested in the moment that gets looked over, the exhale, often an incredibly brief, very different set of emotions that move over someone or a slight change in body posture when one thinks they are no longer being watched. Degas said "the pause between two actions." I like using things that are often ignored, the discards or the seconds. The showboat or the lead gets tired quickly - the wallflowers have had more work and so have more interesting content. There is the impossibility of owning anything, other people being the least possible. The 'captured moment' , the photographer as hunter, I mean what does one have really? Emulsion, some effects of light, some plastic. And yet there is something. So what is the work? The imprint left by the thing that was gone as soon as I pressed the shutter. What is left are the stories I made up. And I like how stories change depending on where one decides to put something. The work can get very dark but I don't feel like a dark person." - June 2006

Cass Morris

Portal Series
Portal: door, window, opening, gate, entrance, outlet, threshold, border, passageway. This is an ongoing series of photographs about the paths and ways we travel on our journey through life, day to day, from place to place. Portals are symbolic for everyone: as openings to the known or the unknown, as transitions from one state of being to another, as in the uncertainty of crossing a new threshold. The single door photographs I regard as portraits: individual entities with special shapes, decoration, character or "attitude". The qualities that make me notice my subjects are the light and shadow, colors, shapes, textures, and my perpetual curiosity about what's behind the door or around the corner.
My first camera was an Agfa Synchrobox, which I received at the age of 10 when we were stationed in France. I still have it, along with many other cameras. I print my own photographs, now most all archival inkjet pigment prints on 100% cotton rag paper.

Naomi Policoff

Images come to life in my mind easily. Translating them into color and form is the challenge. Negative space has always intrigued me, sometimes excluding the main subject.

With the prints I’m showing, I have tried to follow the title of the show, Light and Dark. In some, the light could be the sky or water, and the darks give me a chance to show off my love of color as well as my favorite shapes coming through. They are monotypes with either embossing, chine colle’, or multiple drop.