Light Work awards 2006 Grants in Photography to local residents

Light Work awards 2006 Grants in Photography to local residentsApril 20, 2006Jessica Heckmanjhheckma@syr.edu

Light Work has awarded its annual Grants in Photography to three local residents. For the past 32 years, Light Work has awarded grants to photographers, critics and photo historians who reside in Central New York. This year’s recipients are Laura Heyman of Syracuse; Thilde Jensen of Truxton; and Rishi Singhal of Syracuse. The grant is a fellowship that includes a $2,000 cash award, an exhibition at Light Work in the fall semester and publication in The Light Work Annual. (Above: “New Delhi 2005” by Rishi Singhal)

Applicants were required to submit 10 examples of their work and a short application form. Judges from outside the grant area selected recipients based on the merits of their work. The Light Work Grants in Photography program is part of Light Work’s ongoing effort to provide support and encouragement to artists working in photography. The grants also aim to foster an understanding and appreciation for photographic arts in Central New York.

Laura HeymanHeyman’s work is mainly focused in portraiture. Her submitted work, from the series “The Photographer’s Wife,” features a female subject looking intimately at the photographer, resulting in images that would seem to be an artist photographing their lover. Heyman serves the role of the photographer as well as the subject, creating for the viewer “both a fictionalized subject and a fictionalized photographer.” Her inspiration for this series came from past images made by men of their wives and lovers.

Thilde JensenJensen’s images in her series “Human Canaries” are a personal account of the life she has lived with multiple chemical sensitivity and the people she has met who suffer the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed “human canaries,” and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a “ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture.” Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets and doctor’s offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career and moved to the country, where she lived in a tent away from regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides and exhaust fumes.

Rishi SinghalSinghal has traveled the world since 2004 photographing the series “Condition of Urbanity.” The images look at natural and built environments, and how they are related to one another. He is particularly interested in urban environments, in areas where physical and metaphoric transitions are constantly occurring. He captures cities that were once at their pinnacle of economic and cultural boom, but are now struggling under the loss of jobs to off-shore agencies; urban and social planning failures; and industry closure. Singhal photographed this series first in Western Europe and then in New Delhi, India. He is currently photographing in the American Rustbelt, focusing on areas that have “undergone deleterious transformations over the last two decades.”

The judges for the 2006 Light Work Grants competition were Lonnie Graham, Lisa Robinson and Marni Shindelman. Graham participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in 2000 and was recently named Pennsylvania State Artist of the Year. He is currently a professor of visual and integrative arts at Pennsylvania State University and an instructor of special programs at the Barnes Foundation.

Robinson participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in February 2006. She lives in Jackson Heights, N.Y., and has been photographing snowscapes since 2003. She looks for man-made, singular objects blanketed in heavy layers of snow.

Shindelman is assistant professor of art and an associate of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. Her work ranges from printmaking to photographic imagery to sculpted soap and incorporates found hypertexts, medical myths and news events with icons of the banal.

For more information, contact Light Work at 443-1300.