Opens Sunday October 1, 2023

Lyle Ashton-Harris: Our First and Last Love

Drawing together photographs and installations from both his celebrated and lesser-known series, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love charts new connections across the artistic practice of Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). The exhibition explores Harris’s critical examination of identity and self-portraiture while tracing central themes and formal approaches in his work of the last 35 years.

Harris’s work engages with broad social and political dialogues while also speaking with revelatory tenderness to his own communities, and to personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. Groupings centered around singular Shadow Works will expand upon these multiple through lines, including Harris’s continued examination of otherness and belonging; the framing and self-presentation of Black and queer individuals; violence as a dark undercurrent of intimacy and desire; tenderness and vulnerability; and notions of legacy—both inherited and self-defined.

Opens Monday, October 2, 2023

The Rock in the Storm: Photoassemblage by Dawn Surratt

The Rock In The Storm is based on the Silent Year project which is an exploration of the interior landscape of transitions; the deepest places of alchemy where our ability to adapt to losses spring from. These spiritual holding spaces of becoming, portray the places where body and spirit meet and define one another.

The Covid pandemic was the catalyst for this work as I experienced my inner world shifting with the restrictions and upheaval of the world around me. Loosely based on the teachings of Swiss psychiatrist C.G.Jung, I have universalized these adaptations to change by creating visual archetypes. Through the repeated use of a single face, the inner psychological processes become the focus and the human figure is merely a visual bookmark from which to anchor to.

The process of adaptation and transition has always been steeped in mystery. It doesn't happen all at once but in increments of light and awareness. The impetus for change may be abrupt or more subtle in nature, it may vary in intensity or in length, but the result is always the same; we adapt.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Artist Reception for Murray Bognovitz: NPR Exposure

Murray Bognovitz, a professional photographer whose work has been reproduced in numerous magazines and books, undertook a personal mission to photograph the people who create what we hear on National Public Radio. He spent two years traveling to wherever the voices were. A number of his photographs in the book, NPR: The Cast of Characters as well as some not shown there, were part of an exhibition called " NPR Exposure" at a Washington gallery in 1993. He has created other photo essays, including a hitchhiker's documentary of people who picked him up as he traveled from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and people he picked up driving

Weekdays Through October 16th, 2023

Opens Saturday October 7, 2023

The I REMEMBER Project: Assembled Memories / Shared Histories by Elizabeth Stone

The I REMEMBER Project is a participatory multi-generational community engagement project that resulted in public artworks. The Project was inspired by artist Joe Brainard’s
book I Remember, conceived during the imposed isolation of the pandemic in 2020 and created during an artist-in-residency at Cassilhaus in Chapel Hill in October of 2021.

The multiple artworks in the I REMEMBER project incorporate thousands of photographic negatives and slides that were collected from generous community
members in the greater Durham, Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, North Carolina communities. Each donation depicts individual and family histories and collectively, the artworks function as a record of the area’s identity.

The donated photographic materials span over 100 years and provide a window to life in this area from the early 1900’s to 2021. The images reveal moments in our lives,
slices of time that encourage reflection: weddings, funerals, family gatherings, trips, portraits of loved ones, light falling on the landscape and of course cats.

Please join us on Saturday, October 7th at 3-5pm for the opening reception in the Grand Gallery at Golden Belts Arts.

Opens Thursday October 12, 2023

Our Disappearing Darkness: Photographs by MJ Sharp

Until the advent of artificial lighting 200 years ago, darkness and night had been the universal human experience and the one for which we and all life on earth evolved. Recent excavations at some prehistoric sites in the UK have revealed evidence that megalithic stone monuments thousands of years old may have been visited at night or in low light. Recent studies have shown that the effects of rapidly increasing light pollution have deleterious effects on human, plant, and animal life.  Please join us on Thursday, October 12th, at The Fruit in Durham for an installation that evokes the artist’s nighttime contemplation and photographing of such prehistoric ruins at night as part of her recent Fulbright year in Cornwall.

Times: 12:00pm - 10:00pm

Friday, October 20, 2023

Third Friday Reception: "Inked" - Titus Brooks Heagins

I began documenting Black bodies with ink in 2008. That same year I wandered into The Inkwell in Durham. My interest lay in the connection between African scarification and its modern illustrations throughout the diaspora of the Americas. The deep-rooted practice of permanently embedding symbols that have cultural significance represents rites of passage, remembrances of kinship, as well as friendships, and spiritual rituals. They may also signify purity, messaged to others who silently observe, but acknowledge in understanding and agreement.

For millennia Africans have used tattoos to protect against spirits, cure diseases, provide tactile signifiers of courage, and to denote social status. For me, tattoos were a path to an unexplored linkage to a past denied by centuries of involuntary servitude and the destruction of memories of ancestral practices. I am drawn to the sensuality of dark ink on even darker skin. For my eye, the beauty of Blackness is not only layered, but multiplied. Wearing a tattoo marks a change, a willingness, no, a drive, or desire to mark a transformation in life.

In our lives, no matter the condition, there are symbols we place in our hearts, and sometimes on our skin. They remind us of our obligations, and bind us in community that reminds us that we are not alone in this world. They help us to hold on to ourselves, reclaim lost spirits, most of all, they return us to love.

6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Semans Gallery - Durham Arts Council 120 Morris Street Durham, NC, 27701