Point of Contact Gallery will host the opening reception of “Look Now: Facing Breast Cancer,” a photographic exhibition and multimedia installation, on Thursday, Oct. 11. “Look Now: Facing Breast Cancer” breaks down the barriers between the public persona of survivors and their private struggles with the disease.
Project director Tula Goenka and project photographer Cindy Bell will deliver a gallery talk and tour at 5 p.m., with the reception following from 6-8 p.m. These events are free and open to the public. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served. Free parking is available on the night of the reception in the Syracuse University lot on the corner of West Street and West Fayette Street.
“Look Now: Facing Breast Cancer” will be on view from Oct. 8 – 31 at the Point of Contact Gallery. The gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 12-5pm or by appointment.
In 2010, Tula Goenka, a breast cancer survivor herself, was the first of three subjects photographed for “Look Now.” She has now re-launched the project with a new collaborative team as a multimedia installation.
In 2018-19, “Look Now” focuses on the personal stories of survivors from Central New York. Interactive text, graphics, mirrors and an experimental silent film enhance the exhibition’s visual core, which presents 44 participants—25 with clothed photographic portraits and images of bare chests, and 19 who have chosen to remain anonymous except for their bare-chest close-ups. Future phases include a new media site and a spoken word performance in collaboration with playwright Kyle Bass.
Goenka is the Newhouse Endowed Chair of Public Communications at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and a noted human rights activist, filmmaker, author, and founder and co-director of Syracuse University’s annual Human Rights Film Festival.
Bell is a nationally known, ADDY Award-winning photographer who has engaged in multiple visual projects about breast cancer survivors and authored the photobook, Common Thread. Look Now is part of Syracuse University’s Syracuse Symposium series, whose theme in 2018-19 is Stories, an exploration of how we tell them and what effects whose stories we hear.
