Image by Meredith Davenport

Project Midtown by Meredith Davenport
Run of Show: June 2 – June 20, 2014
Where: VSW Project Space, 31 Prince Street
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM
Brown bag lunch discussions with the artist: Wednesdays June 4, 11, 18, 12:30-1:30PM 

Over the past few years Meredith Davenport has been fascinated by the demolition and slow re-building of the Midtown Plaza in Rochester in which she finds an uncanny visual relevance to the images of the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. These references of destruction and despair lie in the literal heart of the city of Rochester, to an empty space that moves between promise and disappointment. The entire process of the destruction of Midtown Plaza has been documented by a camera on top of a building across the street which streams the information live to a website. Beyond the metaphors of destruction as a force of renewal, which are also quite common in the news media, Davenport has been thinking about the idea of nostalgia—a memory of something that never really existed—and how the use of images creates and builds on nostalgia.

Image by Brenda Ann Kenneally

Upstate Girl by Brenda Ann Kenneally
Run of Show: June 15 – July 3, 2014
Where: VSW Gallery, 31 Prince Street
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM

Photojournalist Brenda Ann Kenneally has spent 10 years documenting the lives of women living in Troy, NY below the poverty line. In the process she has gathered 13 terabytes of video documentation, thousands of photos, hundreds of letters written from prison, and historical documents related to social and political forces that have shaped the issues around poverty in the US. With the support of students and faculty at RIT and staff and students at VSW, the long-term project is to build an interactive online documentary and series of books. “Upstate Girl” is an in-progress look at Keneally’s process and her direct involvement with the women documented in her project.

Image by Alex Webb

Memory City by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
In association with Gallery R
Run of Show: June 18 – July 3, 2014
Where: Gallery R, 100 College Ave, Rochester, NY
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 1-5PM
Public Lecture at VSW as part of VSW’s Photo-Bookworks Symposium: June 26, 6PM
Exhibition Reception and Book Signing with the Artists at Gallery R: June 26, 7:30-9:30PM 

Photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb take an elegiac look at Rochester, New York, a city that for 125 years has been the home of Eastman Kodak, which declared bankruptcy in 2012. The photographs in Memory City, made during what may be the last days of film as we know it, are a meditation on film, memory, time, and the city itself. For this project, Alex took images with his last rolls of Kodachrome, a formerly vibrant color film that can now only be processed as black-and white. The resulting photos have a weathered quality akin to a fading memory. Alex also took to the streets of Rochester and shot in digital color – work that punctuates the black and white work with images from his signature style. Rebecca, who still uses film for all her work, responded to the medium’s uncertain future by creating an elegiac refrain of color still lifes and portraits of Rochester women past and present.

Memory City is a forthcoming book published by Radius Books. It will be available at the VSW Bookstore.
Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince Street, Rochester, NY