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Kristine Thompson’s Work Featured in Exhibition at Loyola University in Chicago – and More!

Kristine Thompson, assistant professor of photography in the LSU School of Art, has work featured in the current exhibition, Continuum, at the Ralph Arnold Gallery at Loyola University in Chicago.

The exhibition, curated by Naritaka Minami, features the work of four contemporary photographers who utilize analog photographic processes. Thompson’s project, Images Seen to Images Felt, is an ongoing series of photograms made by pressing light-sensitive photographic paper on the screen of a computer inside a dark room. They are direct impressions of contemporary images that Thompson has collected from a range of online news sources. She performs this process in order to transform photographs that exist in virtual space into tangible objects that viewers confront in the physical space of the gallery. This camera-less image-making process turns the digital images into ghostly presences that encourage viewers to slow down in analyzing the loss and violence depicted.

In his essay about the exhibition, Minami charts the decline of analog processes for many photographers as digital technology has evolved. He organized the exhibition in order to show how contemporary artists continue to innovate these older processes and materials. “Photography’s past that was quickly abandoned by the market has been salvaged by artists in ways that challenge existing ideas of the medium and propose new possibilities in its uses.”

Thompson’s photograms were also included in the Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition at Texas Women’s University’s art gallery in January. Dr. Julia Dolan, the Minor White photography curator at the Portland Art Museum, selected Thompson to receive the exhibition’s top award, which will result in a solo exhibition at TWU’s art gallery in 2018. Kristine also recently participated in the Louisiana Biennial Exhibition at Louisiana Tech University’s School of Design. Rachel Cook from Diverseworks, Houston, juried the exhibition. Thompson’s series, Difficult Things Seen Cannot Be Unseen, received the juror’s choice award.

Thompson also collaborated with Assistant Professor Johanna Warwick on the exhibition We Live in the Gaps between the Stories. In the exhibition, the artists utilize new images and materially re-contextualize them to emphasize the limitations of photography as a complete record of the time. Both artists combine analog and digital processes to underscore the ways in which news photographs have been produced and how that production affects our understanding of cultural history. The exhibition premiers in Missoula, Montana, in April 2017, and will travel to Artspace Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, this summer.

Visit artsevents.luc.edu for more information about Continuum and joyceelainegrant.com/2017 for more information about the Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition at TWU.