Bill McDowell
Ray Torrey, Lily Dale by Bill McDowell
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Ray Torrey, Lily Dale
Bill McDowell
Syracuse, NY)
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- Artwork Info
- About the Artist
- About this Photograph
- Light Work Fine Print Program
-
1995
Gelatin silver print
Signed by artist au verso
Edition of 25
Unframed -
The Lily Dale Assembly was founded in 1879 in Western New York as a retreat for Spiritualists. Today, all 150 residents of Lily Dale are practicing Spiritualists. In order to practice as a medium in the village one must pass a rigorous screening by the town board. In 1991 Bill McDowell began photographing and taping interviews at Lily Dale to document residents of the community who are mediums and Spiritualists both by conviction and occupation.
- Light Work was founded as an artist-run, non-profit organization in 1973. Its mission is to provide direct support to artists working in photography and related media through residencies, publications, exhibitions, and a community-access lab facility. Light Work's Fine Print Program, featuring exclusive signed prints by acclaimed photographers, represents an excellent way to further your personal art collection while supporting Light Work’s mission of offering opportunities to emerging and under-recognized artists.
Bill McDowell is a photographer living in Plattsburgh, New York. This diptych of two images is from his project Ground, a series of photographs taken from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) archive of “killed” negatives. These negatives that had been damaged with a hole punch by the FSA staff in the 1930s. McDowell’s sequence of photographs relates to land and agriculture, and is mediated by the manner in which the killed negative’s black hole abstracts subject, space, and time. With this, he creates a dense narrative connecting contemporary and Great Depression Americas. McDowell is the 2013 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as many other artist grants. McDowell’s photographs are represented in collections at the Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont. McDowell participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1995.