Review by curator Laurie Freitag: "The title, 'Sometimes we enter art to hide within' shows the subject hiding most of their face but revealing a grasp or hold on that decision. Each of Hovanesian's fingers are adorned with symbols of something precious or meaningful to her. Those same fingers gently reveal part of her face, almost shyly, but deliberately. Interesting choices."
 

Review by curator Laurie Freitag:
"Terra Form is defined as having to do with the process of change to earth to make it habitable for human life. I love the choice to untitle this piece as to title it would limit what the change possibly is.

It could be that Clark is speaking about a personal change/conformity or it could be a larger view of how humanity must make changes to continue to inhabit the earth. A very provacative image."

Review by curator Laurie Freitag: "Dan cook's image 'Thankful' struck me as a vulnerable moment. The subject has undergone openheart surgery and frames the scar with an open shirt...but looks away from the camera. He seems to bow his head in reverence giving thanks to be alive. A beautiful moment."

Dan Cook says, "Creativity arises in conversation with constraints—the constraints enforced by the medium or media employed, by the long history of artistic attempts of those who have come before us and by the immediate circumstances of one’s life, attitude and self-imposed challenges.

A key constraint of photography is that it anchors one, however tenuously, to some version of the here- and-now....to some present moment that must be grappled with visually.

Photography, as I have experienced it, struggles with the tension between subject and form differently than other visually-oriented media to the extent that it lives off of some aspect of the world as given.

The streetscape, the varied and variable circumstances of light and shadow, the objects in the environment, among other things, all in some way have to be handled and taken into account. In this sense, I liken photography closer to sculpture than to painting."

Dan Cook is a resident of Philadelphia and a professor at Rutgers University-Camden. A self-taught, non-professional photographer, Cook teaches on, among  other things, visual research methods and visual ways of knowing. He is a member of the Copley Society of Art, the Sketch Club of Philadelphia and Philadelphia PhotoArts.

www.copleysociety.org/users/dancook

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