Biography
...continued from page two
With the exhibit Ice Worms and Plate Lunch, at 96 Gillespie in London, I started working on installing work specific to a space. In this exhibit that I both curated and participated in, were 12 half-frame color photographs taken in Alabama and printed in London. Each photograph was installed in conjunction with an object one could buy in a store in Alabama. I used the original wood paneling from the walls of the gallery (similar to those found in Alabama) and used it to make shelves to hold the photographs. Attached to each shelf was another shelf for the corresponding object. Despite its simplicity, this idea was a departure from my previous work, and I was able to use my building skills in the exhibit.
Cynthia Connolly Photogs was an exhibit featuring over 200 photographs of Alabama installed to resemble a local store one might find in Alabama, in which the objects for sale were the framed photographs that stood alone on the shelves, divided into categories like "People", "Buildings", "Nature" and "Signs".
See All Fifteen at Once was another exhibit that had an installed element about Alabama, complete with plans for touring the exhibit.
Being the Director and Curator of Arlington County's Ellipse Arts Center has provided me the opportunity to curate many shows. These shows are extensions of my interest in my own work as an artist. One exhibit titled You Are Here displayed four mid-Atlantic artists who use maps in their work. Another exhibit, The Thread as the Line, which opened in 2008, explained a movement of contemporary sewn art. While I was traveling around selling postcards, I noticed, beginning in 2001, that many artists were sewing their work together and doing embroidery on canvas to create "paintings". Although I could not be in this exhibit, I myself was experimenting with a similar medium. I was letterpressing layers of colors and words onto my photos, and I then cut them apart and sewed them back together in different ways. I sewed portions of my photographs to create new images.
I see the process of curation as something that contributes to my own work, and I will eventually create my own exhibits inspired by those I curated at the Ellipse Arts Center.
After mid 2001, I shifted the focus of my photography from the American West to the East and South. Going to the Rural Studio provided a crash course on the South and also provided me a greater understanding about the region where I live. After Alabama, I thought it might be nice to live in southwest Virginia, which is closer to home, and similar to (yet not) Alabama. I never quite moved there; I ended up in Arlington again and dated a guy in Blacksburg, Virginia who provided me my second home away from home. The five-hour drive south from Arlington to Blacksburg offered me many routes to seek and find more opportunities for photography. In 2007 a photo essay and article titled Punks Who Play Old Time —the photographs were shot primarily at Clifftop, West Virginia —was published in Fretboard Journal.
More recently, I have conducted workshops including a talk on my experience at the Rural Studio at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt in New York and at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, A letterpress workshop at the Andy Warhol Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and finally a workshop in Madrid Spain on "How to Take Beautiful Pictures of Nothing".
My work has been printed in many magazines and books including Art in America, Index Magazine, Fretboard Journal, Anthem, Paper Magazine, Emigre, Jane Magazine, YM, 7X7 San Francisco, After Hours, Tokion's "disobedients" (art) issue, Bust Magazine, Gargoyle Literary Magazine, Tape Op, Heckler, Blue, The Photo Review, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Great God Pan, Speed Kills, Concussion, Cool Beans, Double Negative, and Punk Planet; and such books as The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, Our Band Could be Your Life, Declaration of Independents, Foder's Rock 'n' Roll Traveler, USA, Dance of Days, Hitori-"altogether one", from Japan, Lengths and Breaths with Lee Ranaldo, and the book in conjunction with the exhibit Beautiful Losers.
Presently, I live in Arlington County, Virginia, where I am the Visual Arts Curator for Artisphere, a 60,000 square foot Cultural Center, play the banjo, and work with my letterpress. I continue to create my own exhibits from my ever-growing collection of photographs in the full and half-frame 35mm format.
Cynthia Connolly
PO Box 3358
Arlington, VA 22203
All content is ©2020 by Cynthia Connolly