Artist Conversation and Book Signing with Susan Bank and Bryon Wolfe as they share their work and the evolution of The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads.

Elizabeth Newhall of the Philadelphia Inquirer describes it as one of the top exhibitions this fall.

The Expanded Caribbean: Contemporary Photography at the Crossroads, features work by 16 artists with projects based in several different nations and communities neighboring the Caribbean Sea. The exhibition brings together images that document, interrogate, challenge, and otherwise engage the meaning of place in an area with a rich history as a target of exploration and conquest, voluntary and forced migration, trade, travel, and tourism. Responding variously to cultural, historical, mythological, and personal aspects of the region, artists initiate dialogues about how events of the past inform contemporary experience in a continually shifting and evolving environment.

Susan S. Bank, author of Cuba: Campo Adentro (honored as Best Books of the Year 2009 by PHotoEspaña and Photo-eye books,) captures a poetic portrait of an -out-of-the-way agricultural community in Pinar del Rio Province where Bank lived and worked for more than 6 years. What began as a weekend retreat from the hustle of Havana, became an intense personal project for Bank, who returned again and again to work with ten families who live without benefit of modern conveniences.
Piercing the Darkness (Best Book of the Year in Non-Professional category by Lucie Foundation 2016,) peels away the veneer from Havana and illuminates the invisible with Bank’s iconic, metaphorical black and white photographs. Bank focuses on multi-layered ordinary moments – moments in which reality slips seamlessly into the surreal. Edited and sequenced by Bank, her works presents a timeless narrative of passion, utopian dreams, and disappointments. Piercing the Darkness follows Bank’s self-published monograph Cuba: Campo Adentro, a portrait of rural life.

Byron Wolfe, Professor and the Program Director of Photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, engages photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s largely unknown pictures from 1875-1876 through the practice of rephotography. Wolfe’s book, Phantom Skies and Shifting Ground: Landscape, Culture, and Rephotography in Edweard Muybridge’s Illustrations of Central America, is a collaborative research project and publication with cultural geographer Dr. Scott Brady. Together, they trace Muybridge’s travels through Guatemala and Panama to create photographic and textual analyses of the sites, spaces, and cultures based upon Muybridge’s significant visual benchmark of 19th Century Central America. Their efforts were complicated by the fact that many of Muybridge’s photographs were combination prints – constructed composite images drawn from multiple scenes.

AT THE GALLERY YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CONTRIBUTE TO RELIEF FUNDS FOR PUERTO RICO THROUGH GLOBAL GIVING.

ABOUT THE LEONARD PEARLSTEIN GALLERY
The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, part of Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, is committed to exhibiting novel and experimental art in all contemporary mediums. Located in Westphal College’s URBN Annex, the Pearlstein Gallery has over 3,500 square feet of modern exhibition space and invites the public to visit free of charge.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Leonard Pearlstein Gallery
215-895-2548, gallery@drexel.edu