EXHIBITION

Snap! Orlando’s ‘Motion to Light’ explores movement, lighting, hope and features works of photographers from France, Thailand, Czech Republic, Japan, Poland, Canada, Germany plus New York, Los Angeles, and Portland. Snap! Orlando is a large scale international photography event with exhibits, projections and installations, salon talks, guest speakers lectures, workshops, competitions and community engagement:
Vicki DaSilva is an American artist producing light painting photography since 1980. She is credited with the term ‘light graffiti’ as well as being the first artist to make deliberate text light graffiti photographs with her photograph titled Cash. DaSilva’s most recent accolade occurred in June 2012 when she was selected as the solo grand-prize winner of Art Takes Time Square, a competition of over 35,000 artists presented by Artists Wanted in New York City. DaSilva’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach, Fountain Art Fair NYC, Architectural Digest Home Design Show NYC, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and numerous more.

Czech photographer Martin Stranka’s images exist in that narrow window between dreaming and awakening. Stranka won over 40 major international photography awards including Professional Photographer of the Year, Emerging Talent Award (in the Nikon International Photo Contest), Sony World Photography Awards, EISA Photo Maestro, and International Photo Awards two years in a row. Stranka’s work was presented in prestigious galleries such as Saatchi Gallery and Robert Fontaine Gallery, exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Banksy, Damien Hirst, Helmut Newton and Albert Watson.

Snap! Orlando joined forces with Red Bull in support of an innovative project. Fusing fine art and skilled athleticism, “Motion to Light” pairs established light painters, Patrick Rochon, and Vicki DaSilva with some of the world’s best athletes, Mike Dowdy, Adam Errington, Dallas Friday, and Chris Santacroce, in unprecedented partnership. The project pushes the existing boundaries of action sports photography, seeking to explore the artistry of athletic movement and emotion through the medium of light while capturing its essence on film. Above photo by Patrick Rochon.

Christy Lee Rogers’ work is undeniably contemporary yet also timeless; Christy’s images resemble Baroque paintings examining the chiaroscuro qualities of light. Using water as a medium for breaking the conventions of contemporary photography, her subjects bend and distort; bathing in darkness, isolated by light, and brought to life by ones own imagination. Rogers’ works have been exhibited throughout the US and Europe and are held in private collections throughout the world.

Polish photographer Szymon Brodziak is the grand prize-winner of Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Award for the constant fulfillment of dreams and the passion for setting new paths in the search of beauty, and received four Silver Medals at the 2011 Prix de la Photographie Paris. His work has been published in fashion magazines around the world, including Italian Vogue. Brodziak presented his 2013 book project “Naughty Girls” at Snap! His work was shown courtesy of Factory 311.

Patrick Rochon is an award-winning light painting photographer, including first prize at the Nikon photo contest in Japan. Born in Montreal, Canada, Patrick has lived in Tokyo, New York and Paris for 15 years. Rochon’s work involves the movement of light. Patrick is well known for his light painting portraits and his live light painting performances.

New York based fashion photographer Aurora Crowley who uses light as the medium to capture beauty and energy. Originally a hairstylist, he picked up a camera on set, when he felt that photographers weren’t capturing his hairstyles properly. His good friend, and fellow artist, Patrick Rochon introduced him to light painting photography. Aurora uses light sources to overlay slick, artistic lines over his models.

Since the age of 10, Jill Greenberg has staged photographs and created characters using the media of drawing, painting, sculpture, film, and photography. She is known worldwide for her uniquely human animal portraits which intentionally anthropomorphize her subjects. Her photos have graced the cover of Newsweek, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Time and she was selected by French Photo Magazine for their 40th anniversary issue to represent one of the 40 most important photographers. Her work is shown courtesy of ClampArt.

Indonesian born, Mei Xian Qiu is a Los Angeles based photographer. Her series, “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom,” printed on plexiglass, explores the anxieties of power and globalism, national and intercultural identity, and the notion of non self-constructed and deconstructed individualism. Mei Xian Qiu was first place winner of LA Center for Digital Art, 2012 juried competition selected by Nancy Meyer of LACMA, and was featured story Zoom Magazine, Winter 2012.

Artist Jay Mark Johnson produces photographic images that challenge the norms of perception. Jay Mark Johnson’s photographs may look like photoshop experiments, but they are images taken straight from a slit camera used for capturing vast landscapes. The camera captures light through a small slit in its rotating head, effectively exposing the image slowly from one side to the other. With still landscapes this registers as a normal image, but in Johnson’s work which feature moving subjects, the unique result captures both space and time. Because he has rigged the camera to move at nearly the same speed as his moving subjects, they are recorded as still and recognizable images in a moving background of streaked color. In these images we are not simply seeing left to right, but in fact left is the past and right is the future.
Acclaimed humanitarian photographer Lisa Kristine specializes in images of remote indigenous people. Lisa has documented in over 80 countries on six continents, using a 19th century 4×5” field view camera for the majority of her work. Lisa’s work has been auctioned by Christie’s New York for the United Nations with Kofi Annan. Her images were the inspiration for 8 year old Vivienne Harr to create the Make A Stand Lemonade, which raised over $400,000 to date to free enslaved children.
Our special guest: Vivienne Harr. In May, 2012, then eight year-old Vivienne was inspired to take action after seeing a photo of two Nepalese children, roughly her age, holding hands while carrying giant slate rocks with straps across their heads (photo: from our guest speaker Lisa Kristine’s photo book Slavery). Vivienne knew this was wrong, so with her family’s support, she set up a “lemon-aid” stand (for 300 days and counting, rain or shine!) and asked people to “pay what’s in their heart” for her lemon-aid. As Vivienne says, “compassion is not compassion without action.” Make a Stand offers anyone the chance to support a child’s vision to make a stand, end child slavery, and make the world a better place. Vivienne has raised awareness worldwide, and over $400,000 in less than a year. She set up lemonade stands throughout Orlando during Snap!’s weekend!
Stephen Knapp is an American artist best known for his use of the medium of lightpainting. He has gained an international reputation for large-scale works of art held in museums, public, and private collections, which are executed in media as diverse as light, kiln-formed glass, metal, stone, mosaic, and ceramic. For nearly a decade after graduating from college, he worked as a fine art photographer, selling his work to corporate and private collectors in the United States and abroad. During this early stage in his career Knapp worked closely with Polaroid Corporation on their 20×24 camera, creating large scale instant photographs.
Born in 1983 in Castres, France, Nicolas Sénégas studied anthropology and photography. Early on, he developed a passion for studying humans, in their physical and aesthetical dimensions, but also in their approach to spirituality, rites, customs, desires and fears. Nicolas joined us at Snap! in May 2013.
Cedric Arnold is a documentary photographer based in Bangkok, Thailand. Having lived in SE Asia for many years, Arnold was always intrigued by beliefs in magic in the region. Arnold’s powerful, yet sensitive portraits present a mystical subculture through its rituals, and symbols; a chest etched with a fierce leaping tiger, a hand adorned with images of geckos on each finger, a back protected by a monkey God, or a shoulder inscribed with ancient Khmer text… Shot on a 4×5” camera the series of black-and-white portraits – the negatives of which are chemically altered by brushing various chemicals onto the emulsion depict men from all walks of life and all ages, proudly showing the inked protection on their bodies. Courtesy the Lucie Foundation
Cedric Arnold is a documentary photographer based in Bangkok, Thailand. Having lived in SE Asia for many years, Arnold was always intrigued by beliefs in magic in the region. Arnold’s powerful, yet sensitive portraits present a mystical subculture through its rituals, and symbols; a chest etched with a fierce leaping tiger, a hand adorned with images of geckos on each finger, a back protected by a monkey God, or a shoulder inscribed with ancient Khmer text… Shot on a 4×5” camera the series of black-and-white portraits – the negatives of which are chemically altered by brushing various chemicals onto the emulsion depict men from all walks of life and all ages, proudly showing the inked protection on their bodies. Courtesy the Lucie Foundation
German photographer Stephanie Jung travels the world to capture the vibrant and hectic mood of a place. Motifs such as urbanity, identity, and anticipation placed at tension with cultural tradition stand at the center of the unique images of Japan by Stephanie Jung. Depicted are the everyday street and cityscapes of Tokyo, Shibua, Osaka, and Nara, which neither wish to appear as the superficial documentation of nature, nor an exotic local color. Quite the contrary, the images resemble precise snapshots of the urban everyday, which seems to have been particularly shaped by the routine and quite flow of time. Stephanie debuted her US exhibit at Snap!
As the shadow of night falls across the American West a lone man begins his work. Far from the confines, calamity, and culture of society, multimedia artist and storyteller Jeff Frost sifts through the visual dregs of places and people who once were. Combining still and time-lapse photography with motion, music, and art, Frost reveals a world rarely seen. Rooted in science and the exploration of space, Frost’s work explodes with light, fire, and sound, utilizing 2D and 3D perspective, leading the viewer on a unique visual journey through worlds both real and imagined.

In his photographic self-portrait series artist Kerry Skarbakka captures himself in moments of suspended peril: falling from trees, tumbling head over heels in painfully precarious falls, slipping nude in the shower, or teetering on the edge of a fateful leap from a railway bridge. In his artist statement, Skarbakka references philosopher Martin Heidegger’s description of human existence as a process of perpetual falling, and the responsibility of each person to catch ourselves from our own uncertainty.

Santlov is a Miami-based photographer/graphic artist and mastermind behind the viral ToysRLikeUs photography campaign. His seemingly realistic photographs consist of widely recognized, iconic toy characters finding themselves in the midst of relatable everyday-like human scenarios – a style that uniquely synchronizes fantasy with reality.

Nerhol’s latest work, “Misunderstanding Focus”, consists of multiple ‘conversions.’ Generally speaking, a portrait renders a three-dimensional face onto a flat plane. However, Nerhol, the Japanese creative duo of Yoshihisa Tanaka and Ryuta Iida, makes portraits more complex through multiple conversions. Simply put, these artists undertake at least three processing steps: after converting a three-dimensional face into a two-dimensional portrait, they translate the latter into a three-dimensional sculpture, which in turn is made into a two-dimensional portrait.

Jim Kazanjian’s surreal landscapes offer phantasmagoric visions of a where-is-this world, defined by impossibly complex architecture and M.C.Escher-esque black-and-white graphics. Inspired by the imaginary realms of cult author H.P. Lovecraft – whose wild, cosmic short stories set the mold for much of the 20th century’s best science fiction – Kazanjian’s aim is to redress the “misunderstanding that photography has a kind of built-in objectivity.”

Magnetic Field presents a nocturnal flight through an illuminescent dreamscape representing humanity’s electrified worlds. Dmitry Kmelnitsky is the co−founder of ‘Lustre’, an interdisciplinary creative group that addresses socio−cultural issues in the convergence of arts and technology. His multimedia, video and installation works have been exhibited in galleries, performing arts centers, as well as in national and international media art festivals. As a composer, designer and media artist he explores innovative experiential and narrative approaches to communication through motion−based, immersible and interactive audiovisual media. Dmitry is professor of Multimedia Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.