Art and Art History Department Exhibits

Uranium Photographs

Images made via autoradiography, exposed with uranium forty-five days. (An autoradiograph is a photograph made with radiation.)

Photography by Peter Shellenberger will be on exhibit through October 1 in the Francis Colburn Gallery, 3rd floor, Williams Hall. According to Shellenberger, "My work draws from the history of science and photography as well as from knowledge I’ve gained from years going to flea markets and garage sales. I learned that the red-orange glaze made from Fiestaware in the 1930s and 1940s was created using uranium oxide, the same kind of uranium later used to make the atomic bomb. The uranium remains radioactive in the dinnerware today. I cover unexposed film with the Fiestaware and, after about two years of experimenting with different kinds of film, lengths of exposure, and objects that will make silhouettes (I chose Cracker Jack toys from the same era as the Fiestaware), I’ve succeeded in making a series of glowing purple “nuclear” prints."

For more information, contact Tom Brennan at tbrennan@uvm.edu.

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Shellenberger is a photographer currently residing in Brunswick, ME. Most recently his work was included in Both Sides of the Camera: Photographs from the Collection of Judith Ellis Glickman at the Portland Museum of Art and You Can’t see This: Photographs at the Limits of Visibility curated by Meggan Gould for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Peter’s work has been exhibited at places such as Zero Station, the University of Southern Maine, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Shellenberger was also the founder and director of the Photography Cooperative from 1991 – 1996 and he was a founding member of the Portland Film and Video Artists Collective. He holds a BFA from Maine College of Art, and an MFA in photography from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Currently he is a Visiting Professor in the Photography department at MECA.

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Here's What We're Gonna Do

In this series assistant professor Mildred Beltré uses the idea of the schematic (which is by definition an oversimplification) to talk about things that are too big to talk about. Borrowing imagery from disparate sources (West African religion, past and current radical political movements and sports) she attempts to describe relationships in the world both as they are and how they might be.

The Francis Colburn Gallery is located on the 3rd floor of Williams Hall, October 4-22, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, October 6 from 5:30-7:00 p.m.  There will be an informal gallery talk at 6:00 p.m.

BIOGRAPHY

Born and raised in New York City, Mildred Beltré received her undergraduate degree at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She continued her tour of the midwest by studying at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA) where she received an MA and an MFA in printmaking and photography. She has shown at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Jaffe-Freide Gallery, Dartmouth College, NH;  Load of Fun Gallery, Baltimore,  MD;  NYSG, New York, NY; and Atrium Gallery, Western Nevada College, ND, among others. She has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in printmaking and drawing as well as residencies at the Lower East Side printshop and the Vermont Studio Center. This summer she received a New Yorkers for Better Neighborhoods Award  from the Citizens Committee, for a public art project exploring community through art-making. Traveling between Queen City and Kings County, Mildred Beltré is an artist, a popular educator, a mom, and a professor at the University of Vermont.

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Inside Out

An exhibit of paintings by Rachel Kahn-Fogel will be available for viewing from September 27 - October 30 in the Livak Fireplace Lounge, 4th floor, Dudley H. Davis Center. The collection consists of intensely colored paintings filled with incongruous objects with distortions of size and proportion revealing humor and mystery.