Artist Walk Through: Chris Engman & Carla Jay Harris

Chris Engman: Prism 

Engman’s latest solo exhibition continues his fascination with the human conditions’ grappling of perception and misperceptions, examining the constructed nature of memory and its relationship to photography. Engman’s signature process consists of elaborate life-size re-rendering of landscapes overlayed onto interior spaces, producing an immersive, multi-dimensional, sculptural, environment that collapses architectural qualities with natural vistas. The installations are documented to produce the final realization of the perspectival shifts and add an additional psychological dimension to the work. Prism adds an additional layer of hand drawn and painted elements produced in collaboration by the artist and his four-year-old son. The result is a record and conversation between father and son as Engman mimics his son's drawings, uses gestures as source materials to embellish, blend and alter. There is also something to be said of the multi-generalional collaboration lending itself to a metaphor for the evolution of the photographic processes and connections to our everyday usage and play.

Carla Jay Harris: Flight

As a trained photographer and cinematographer, Harris uses art, poetry, and historical archives to inform her research and provide inspiration. Flight is a continuation of Harris' 2018 series, Celestial Bodies in which Harris fulfills her search for understanding and belonging drawing from mythology. In Flight, the artist finds inspiration in Black American folktales, allowing Harris to make her work more personal with a deeper connection to her own history and ancestral memory. The first works in this series are inspired by the myths of the Flying African, based on old African folktales. The tales of the Flying African, often shared through oral traditions, spoke of enslaved Africans being lifted up and flying home through a magical passage over the ocean. These stories are filled with visual reminders of truth, freedom, and liberation; a secret language that spoke to those isolated and uprooted from their ancestral roots and removed from their native lands. Harris resonated with the powerful imagery of overcoming and transcending limits and was drawn to the unique overlaps with the themes within her own artistic practice.