Wednesday, August 25, 2010

About Us




Cheryl J. Gowie


Biographical Information/Artist’s Statement



I grew up at the edge of a woods surrounded by fields and orchards. The area was sparsely populated and I was an only child. My playmate was an English Setter who did not object to being dressed up and photographed. Earliest memories are of wandering through the fields picking clover and daisies or wild strawberries, marveling over the structure of jack-in-the pulpits, listening to the calls of Bob Whites and Red-winged Blackbirds, capturing an occasional firefly, following a stream in the woods, coming across an opossum, climbing apple trees, and making multiple “rooms” in the tall grasses in the field. Vacations were camping trips in the Adirondacks with my parents and dog, a week or two with my grandmother and great aunt in Lake George Village, and time at Camp Little Notch (Girl Scouts of America) and Camp Fowler in Speculator. My favorite camping memory is of encountering a fawn in the woods. I loved the water and once swam across Lake George. The natural world felt safe and invited close observation and investigation. Perhaps it is due to the parental warning to “watch where you’re walking” that I always look down as well as ahead and around me and thus notice such plants as Partridge Berries or tiny wild orchids. I am most at peace in the woods, yet simultaneously most alert to details and beauty. I recall the adrenalin rush I felt when first stepping into an Alaskan forest for a botanical walk.

During the summers of my childhood, my parents gave me daily tasks, usually connected with the garden. One job was to thin the radishes. My father was surprised to hear how much time I had spent on that task and I recall defending myself and explaining that transplanting and watering the seedlings was slow going. It never crossed my mind that I was supposed to pull out and discard those tiny living things.

Almost every image in my portfolio relates to some aspect of these early experiences---flora, fauna, landscape, water.

The travel bug bit early and I spent eight months in Germany during my senior year of high school. Since then I have traveled through many U.S. national parks, Canada, Cuba, and approximately 20 European countries. Favorites are Finland and Scotland. Study tours with botanists in North Carolina, Yellowstone National Park, the former Soviet Union (including Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus), and Alaska were wonderful learning experiences.

In 2008 I fulfilled a dream held for 40 years and enrolled in a National Geographic photography workshop in Santa Fe. Participation required use of a digital camera, causing me to retire my trusted and familiar Minolta SLR. That marked a turning point for me: previously I had taken photographs primarily while traveling; now the camera is always close at hand. I have begun to think of myself as a photographer. Vince Musi, Jerry Courvoisier, and Carlan Tapp led that workshop. Something in Carlan’s work told me I had much to learn from him. In two subsequent workshops based in ancient and sacred sites in the Southwest, Carlan has taught me the importance of conveying emotion, spirit, and a sense of place in an image---connecting eye, camera, and heart.

As a German Literature major at Wellesley College, I spent one semester studying Goethe’s Faust. In the play, Faust longs for a moment so beautiful that he would want it to last. The camera allows me to preserve moments I want to remember. I lose awareness of all but the subject and develop a sense of unity with the subject in what theologian and mystic Martin Buber called an I-Thou relationship. Commenting on what I labeled my good luck in capturing images of fawns, my teacher, Carlan Tapp, said, "When we are fully in the moment, these gifts present themselves."

The Photography Center of the Capital District, Chrysalis, the Center for Integrative Health and Healing, and the Boght Arts Center have displayed my photographs.

I am also a professor, psychologist, and teacher educator---roles for which I prepared at the University of Rochester and the University at Albany and now carry out as a member of the faculty at Siena College.




Katherine F. Wardle, Ph.D.

Artist Statement



I cannot interact with the world without both modifying it and revealing something about myself in the process. I am acutely aware of this in many of my life roles: as a psychologist in private practice working with an individual or a couple in distress; as a trained chef transforming nature’s bounty into a creative product for nourishment and joy; and as a photographer using my lens to capture a moment in time which forces the viewer’s attention onto something that otherwise might not have been noticed. In fact, sometimes something that the viewer might have wanted to avoid. What I choose to photograph from my universe says something about me as an artist just as it speaks for me as a cook and as a therapist.



I wish my work to be additive in some way—a gift at times, a comfort, and maybe sometimes even a provocation or a challenge to examine your assumptions as a viewer. With a psychotherapeutic client, I try to reframe what I hear, what I sense, what I understand to be their objective while always aware that my perceptions may not be the conscious or intended ones of the client. With my ingredients as a chef, I will create a different product from the next cook—and sometimes it may be more agreeable to your palate than at other times. And, as a photographer, I may choose to focus on something very different from what you engaged with in traveling the same path as myself.



My photographs speak for what I select from the world around me—that which fascinates, comforts, challenges, or confuses me. Just as people enter therapy with a rich fabric of life’s past, so too am I drawn to complex textures around us in the physical world. I look at what seems to be discarded but which still has use or beauty. Just as I attempt in cooking to draw from raw ingredients their finest moment, so too do I try to use my camera to add my sense of enhanced beauty to our world. I wish to focus on a broad swatch of that world--elements which can shock, content, and often astound us. I want my viewer to stop and savor that which they might otherwise have missed. I want my viewer to rethink what is worth engagement, and to reframe his or her assumptions.



My work has been exhibited at the 2009 New York Photo Festival in Manhattan, the 2009 and 2010 Member Show of the Photography Center of the Capital District, the 2010 Best of the Capital District, at Kismet Gallery in Troy, NY, Crysallis Spa in Troy, and at the Clifton Park Library’s 2009 and 2010 Annual Shows. I am a resident of Rexford, NY, am in private practice as a psychologist in Rexford and Latham, and serve as the Chef/Instructor for Cooking Therapy (cooking school and catering) in Rexford.

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