Exhibiting at 68 Mtn. Rest Rd. New Paltz, NY
Feb 25th – April 3rd, 2023
Opening Reception:
Sat. Feb. 25th • 4pm-6pm
Gallery hours:
(Beginning March 1st)
W-F, 12pm-4pm
Weekends by appointment.
Please contact ally@unisonarts.org to make appointment. Best reached on weekdays.
The Margaret Wade-Lewis Center and Unison Arts jointly invite our beloved community to the opening reception of “Soul Reflections,” an exhibition of photographs that reflect the complex and profound lives of those of African ancestry within our River Valley and across the Diaspora.
The show presents the work of the Soul Reflections Photography Collective—a group of photographers of color residing in Ulster County—and features work by Ben Eichert, Micah Fornari, Melanie Gonzalez, Maria Fernanda Hubeaut, Kristopher Johnson, and Michael Torres. It will run from Feb. 25 through April 3.
See below for artist bios and an essay about the exhibit by curator Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
About the Artists
Melanie Gonzalez
Melanie Gonzalez is a multimedia Photographer and Video/Film production Artist.
Gonzalez is from The Bronx, New York of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent. She acquired a Bachelor’s in Studio Art and Italian language from The City College of New York in 2014.
For the past ten years, Gonzalez has been creating and directing photographic narratives, shooting and editing conceptual visuals, live performance, cultural documentation and interviews, and art directing for installations, music events and art exhibitions.
She has given talks and original presentations on art photography and video to groups at NYC Parks, DreamYard Project, The Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, Mott Hall V, Baychester Middle School, and ICP @ The Point. She is an actor on the stage and occasionally on the screen.
Gonzalez has shown works at Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos, Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, The American Museum of Natural History, Medianoche New Media Gallery & Digital Film Studio, The Andrew Freedman Home, The Clemente Gallery, The Sampler, Rio III Gallery, Temporary Storage Gallery, DROM, Kinfolk 94, The Werehouse, Mosaic Gallery, and B.C.A.D. Gallery. She was a 2016 recipient of the Arts Fund grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts.
Melanie creates work in NYC and beyond, as a traveler shooting landscapes and architectural portraits on analog film.
https://www.suzannaproductions.com/
Ben Eichert
Benny truly believes in the power of photography. In 2016, a photograph from his favorite artist saved his life – literally. That is when he knew that art and photography had the power to help and transform the lives of not only himself, but others as well. Growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional, and adoptive household and then being institutionalized from the ages of 13-18, where he was subjected to emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse; let’s just say he spent his 20’s trying to figure out who he was and surviving his severe PTSD. It wasn’t until after a suicide attempt in 2014 that Ben found his true artistic calling. He registered in a Photoshop and Photography class where he was taught that he could create a portal into his world while conveying the feelings that he had. This is when Ben began to see himself as an artist. His art allowed him to process his pain and struggles. It allowed him to explain how it felt growing up in an adoptive family, discovering and processing his African American ethnicity after the results of DNA test in 2018, and then again after finding his biological family in 2021. Art continues to help him speak more about how racism, dealing with sexual abuse as a male, and his recent discovery of being non-binary has impacted his life. Through therapy and growth, he was able to loosen his grip on his art and share it with the public. On January 4th, 2020, Ben had his first solo show at the Lace Mill in Kingston, NY where he sold 24 pieces of work! He couldn’t have imagined that people would relate to his art so much, it was a humbling experience. Benny has showcased his artistic journey at a TMI performance on August 15th, 2018 and Brooke Shaden’s Promoting Passion 2018 Convention on October 8th, 2018.
Maria Fernanda Hubeaut
Maria Fernanda Hubeaut is an Argentine-American photographer and performance artist whose rich ethnic background and roots in Eastern European, life and philosophy inform her life and her work. Nothing is at it appears, and Hubeaut’s composition and timing capture those encounters in which superficial societal constructs break to reveal our human story of survival and joy, and our astounding capacity to hope, grow, and create beyond our self-imposed limits.
Her solo works as well as her collaborative projects have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, in New York, Boston, France, Czech Republic and Argentina, namely: Performeando, Queens Museum; Museum Fueguino of Art; Museum of Fine Art, Octavio de la Colina (Argentina); Grace Exhibition Space, BK; Panoply Performance Lab, BK; Open Studios (BOS) Bushwick, BK; The Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA); The IMC Lab + Gallery, NYC; Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival; Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; and English Kills Art Gallery, BK, to name a few. She lives and works in New York. She is a certified Plant-Based Nutrition Coach. (T.Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies and Cornell University).
Kristopher Johnson
I fell in love with photography when, at 16 years old, I discovered my father’s old Minolta SRT 101 35mm camera and lens. I taught myself how to use them and I was hooked. After a short stint at The School of Visual Arts in the mid 80s, I became a freelance assistant and B&W printer for fashion, commercial and still life photographers. Working in this capacity allowed me to learn from some of the best photographers in the business. I was also blessed with the opportunity to travel the world as a photography assistant. My own work at that time was mostly B&W fine art nude photography. In 2010, I opened Deep Tanks with my partner Florence Poulain, a Butoh dancer. Deep Tanks was an underground visual arts and performance arts space and my studio located on Staten Island, New York. We were in operation from 2010 to 2016 where I began to capture portraits of artist and performers. In 2011, I began to photograph people at Lumen, an annual international visual and performance arts event on Staten Island, NY. That year I captured 52 portraits and my 'LUMEN ARCHETYPES' series and the 'Deep Tanks Photo Booth' were born. Every year since then, I document Lumen artists and visitors. In 2016, I photographed over 600 people in 6 hours at Lumen. I have set up my pop up studio in bars, basements, city parks to mud rooms. I have photographed at block parties, weddings, birthdays, drag shows and many other events. All of the photos from the People Section are from these events as well as “The Scream” and “Jumping” sections and most of the “Beauties /Beasties” section. In 2016 I moved from New York City to Kingston, NY. We recently opened a 3000sqft studio called Deep Tanks in the heart of Kingston.
Micah Fornari
I am a multidisciplinary artist from Kingston NY. I have a BFA in Illustration from Montserrat College of Art and an AAS in Fine Art from SUNY Ulster. I love working within my community in Kingston, but I also love to travel & have worked with traveling performing arts group WhoopDeeDoo! on multiple projects. In my illustration and paintings my main inspirations are within the horror genre across all forms of media. I also draw inspiration from the saccharine and vibrant color schemes that can be found in media for children and most pop surrealist art. The subjects of my photography tend to be more self exploratory. I use it to explore topics such as my sense of self, my culture, and my friends.
Michael Torres
There are two people who inspire this work. My mother, Mary, gave me my first camera, a Kodak Brownie. She encouraged me to document family life and events and taught me the importance of quiet, patient and keen observation. It was with my cousin Ken Bryant that I started my first photography business, Images Through Mary's Eyes. He managed the website and marketing efforts until his untimely death in October, 2012. Michael A. Torres Photography, LLC presents unique, high quality images for your home, office or business. Through Photomerchant I am able to provide a secure and easy-to-use online store for purchasing professional print and digital products that you will treasure forever.
Essay on “Soul Reflections” by Curator Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Unison Arts Center and The Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Black History Cultural Center are pleased to present Soul Reflections: A Collective of Photographers in Ulster County, a group exhibition of six artists working in the Hudson Valley who have chosen to identify photography as the medium through which our community, our shared belonging, our ways of being in dialogue, in conflict, and healing, can and must exist here, now.
What does it mean to be a photographer of color? And how does Susan Sontag’s dictum that the act of taking a picture is necessarily “predatory”, an act that “turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” complicate the question, especially when considering the way in which, according to Michelle Alexander, America’s racialized caste system has been defined by the desire to turn so many Black and Brown bodies into objects?
Photographs taken by/of people of color are testaments to the possibility of symbolically RE-possessing the colonizing gaze that has sought to possess those of African descent in the first place. Both individually and as a collective, the work of the artists in Soul Reflections coalesces around the idea that this act of REpossession in photography is a fundamental act of agency that allows those for whom history has dictated, often erased, to tell their own story.
Maria Fernanda Hubeaut describes the series “Rayuela” as “a strategy to reflect and
rearrange images of the feminine Self where the existence of an intimate dialogue of the projected body triggers memories encapsulated in the mirror, while the stains of red lipstick transport the viewer to a closer contact with the nature of women. […] The images’ graphic configuration and symbol, and language are used to explore archetypical and violent impositions upon the female body.” The current installation is only one of any number of possible iterations of this work.
Michael Torres’s “Raindrop on Windows” series is the result of what he describes as “the importance of quiet, patient and keen observation.” Torres circumvents the act of “symbolic possession” by focusing on the ephemerality of water–matter that fundamentally cannot be possessed. Torres’ images bathe in aquatic self-emanation, almost as if they birthed themselves, a fluid visualization of the French Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity” in opposition to the colonizer’s insistence on making otherness transparent.
Kristopher Johnson’s nudes are revealed in all their imperfections; scars that are evidence of healing as well as harm, masks that reveal as much as they conceal. Johnson’s figures resist Sontag’s “predatory” gaze typically attributed to the photographer. Instead, their exposure and vulnerability elicits in the viewer a form of empathy as Johnson uses the camera not as a machine for possession but for compassion.
Ben Eichert, an artist who recognizes “growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional, and adoptive household and then being institutionalized from the ages of 13-18”, openly and defiantly chooses to turn the camera onto his own body, an act that splits the image into two gestures: the exposition of the societal failures that have made him who he chooses not to be - and the re-possession of the self that he has since chosen to be.
Micah Fornari’s work as an illustrator and photographer informs the way in which the concept of “character development” can be projected into the realm of one’s own self awareness. Fornari’s images playfully reflect the way in which the potential for “queering” the gaze in portraiture allows one to be seen beyond gender expectations.
Melanie Gonzalez’s Egyptian landscapes are a powerful reminder of the otherworldly presence the pyramids have had on the Western canon – truly a Wonder of the World that has been white-washed in such biblical proportions that its African identity has often been left out of dominant historical narratives. Gonzalez’s “Discount Saints” merge the strategies of a contemporary form of iconography; Gonzales’ fluid process of doubling, alternating and layering of image, word and gesture offers the DuBoisian “double-consciousness” to penetrate her portrait-sitters, allowing them to become objects of veneration on their own terms.
Unison's programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
