The latest exhibition in the Salina Art Center takes a look at significant issues from four different perspectives.
Dissonance and Resonance: Four Photographers is now open at Salina Art Center, 242 S. Santa Fe Avenue. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., and admission is free, though donations are welcome. Masks are required. The exhibition runs through July 25.
Curated by photographer Terry Evans, this stunning show raises questions that affect us all. Reflecting a time of great cultural and ecological upheaval, Evans introduces us to four photographers who work in different ways to raise questions about issues of personal, national, and global significance.
Additionally, Wednesday from noon-1 p.m., is Lunch and Learn with Terry Evans. The Lunch and Learn is free on Facebook Live and Zoom. On Thursday at 6 p.m. is an Artist Talk with photographer Justin Schmitz. This event also is free and in-person at Salina Art Center and on Facebook Live or Zoom. Visit the art center website to register for Zoom events and check out a complete list of special programming for this exhibition.
Evans had the following to say about the four featured photographers.
“Krista Wortendyke explores ways that photography and news media show images of violence in America. As she says, her work is ‘an invitation to pay attention.’ Krista found that news media pictures of violence did not communicate the true harsh realities of the situations. She uses many of these media images in her work, Mass Observation, transforming them to raise questions.
"Through her project, Map Twins, Tonika Johnson has found ways to bring people together across geographic boundaries originally created by redlining and other forms of structural racism. Map Twins are people who live at corresponding addresses on the South and North Sides of the city and who meet and through exploring each other’s neighborhoods come to understand racism that is built into their lives.
"Justin Schmitz photographs and videos moments in the lives of Midwest American teenagers as the teenagers play Airsoft war games with replica guns in his project, In the Mist. His pictures ask us to consider questions about teenage war play shaped by video games and what that play that imitates war means.
"Christina Seely probes issues of climate change creating works of great beauty. Because of her collaboration with scientists and her curiosity and her concern about climate change she brings us stories that pull the viewer into concern and understanding of the complexities of climate change in our lives right now.”
Evans, formerly from Salina, photographs the prairies and plains of North America and the urban prairie of Chicago. Combining both aerial and ground photography, she delves into the intricate and complex relationships between land and people, especially where local people’s landscape is threatened by corporate industrialization. Evans has exhibited widely, including one-person shows at Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, The Field Museum of Natural History, and Amon Carter Museum of Art. Her work is in museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, and many more.
Dissonance and Resonance is generously funded through the Salina Art Center Endowment Foundation, Greater Salina Community Foundation YW Legacy Fund, Sid & Susy Reitz, McCune Foundation, Middlekauff Foundation, and the Stiefel Foundation.