Dissonance and Resonance | Four Photographers

Dissonance and Resonance Krista Wortendyke Tonika Johnson

Justin Schmitz

Four Photographers

Christina Seely

Guest Curator Terry Evans

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4 3 MAY 5 - JULY 25, 2021

1. Justin Schmitz, Smoke, 2019 2. Christina Seely, Species Impact: Arctic - Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus), 2012-2016 3. Tonika Johnson, Together, 2017 4. Krista Wortendyke, #Mass_Observation (detail)

This visually stunning show raises questions that are often hard to face. Working during a time of great cultural and ecological upheaval, these four artists work in different, but interrelated ways to raise questions about issues of violence, guns, racism, and climate change. Through photography, they make their points.

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5. Krista Wortendyke, #Mass_Observation (detail) 6. Justin Schmitz, Aftermath, 2019 7. Tonika Johnson, 6329 S. Paulina, 2017 8. Christina Seely, Species Impact: Arctic - Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus), 2012-2016

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Krista Wortendyke

Approaching Krista Wortendyke’s #Mass_Observation images, I am confused by the difference between my first impressions of these images with their Easter egg colors, their compelling brightness, and the violent explosions that I begin to see in the images when I get close enough to read them. What am I to make of these contradictions? In August, 2014, Krista spent a night watching live streams of the protests in Ferguson, MO to the killing of Michael Brown by police. She watched hours and hours of media images of violence and had tears streaming down her face, she finally realized.

She stopped looking at images that night, but she realized that there was work she needed to continue.

Krista grew up in Nyack, NY, about 30 miles north of New York City. On 9/11, she lost a friend from Nyack in the World Trade Center attack, a banker and volunteer fireman, the man remembered as the man in the red bandanna, who went into the burning building time after time to save people until he finally lost his own life. Krista could not reconcile the loss of her friend with the movie-like media images playing for days of the collapse of the World Trade Center. Later she saw images of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and

9. Krista Wortendyke, #Mass_Observation (detail)

again, they did not seem real, but soldiers were coming home with PTSD. How to reconcile these media images created through photography, her medium as an artist?

Her conflicted responses to media images of violence and the questions they raised for her has found expression in this work, #Mass_Observation, where Krista compiled images of violence in racial unrest

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in America as she worked to learn, herself, about racial justice.

In the interior gallery, we see the beginning of a new project entitled, Transmissions, which shows symbols, glyphs, created by the language of swipe-to-text on Android or Apple smart phones. The glyph is the shape of the shorthand swipe movement made across smart

phone text letters to create a message. Krista layers these symbols on top of media images taken from protests after the killing of George Floyd by police on May 26, 2020.

These are images of dissonance.

Krista Wortendyke

#Mass_Observation Laser jet prints, paint, plywood, wheat paste 308’ x 100’’ #Mass_Observation Inkjet print on adhesive paper 234” x 72”’’ Transmissions Laser jet prints, paint, plywood, wheat paste Two 40” x 60”

Krista Wortendyke (b. 1979, Nyack, New York) is a Chicago-based conceptual artist. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College in 2007.

Her ongoing work examines violence through the lens of photography. Her images are a result of a constant grappling with the mediation of war and brutality both locally and globally. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, The Center for Visual Art in Denver, and many other venues across the United States. Additionally,

Krista’s work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Krista is currently the coordinator for Senn High School’s Fine & Performing Arts Magnet Program, Senn Arts.

Artist Residency July 2 - 11, 2021

10 10. Krista Wortendyke, #Mass_Observation (detail) 11. Krista Wortendyke, #Mass_Observation (detail)

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Tonika Johnson

Moving to resonance, Tonika Johnson cares about place, that is, she loves her home neighborhood, the place she grew up and her community. Tonika’s neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side is considered a high crime area in Chicago and people from the North Side are often afraid to go there. Tonika set out to learn about the reasons for this divide and her work here shows what she did. Through her project, Folded Map, she finds ways to bring people together across geographic boundaries originally created by redlining and other forms of structural racism. Map Twins, who we see here, are people who live at corresponding addresses on the South and North Sides of the city. She has found a way to talk about racism as it is embedded in the geographic structures of Chicago. Her project has grown and now offers Folded Map Project Action Kits available to whomever wants to use them.

many kinds of people together.

Through her inclusive language, she creates her own structure: inviting everyone in to participate, to come visit each other, to explore each other’s neighborhoods, to exchange ideas, worries, and shared visions.

What happens is that the differences also become apparent. Why are there more youth opportunities, better grocery stores, and nicer playgrounds on the North side? We can no longer ignore the extent that racism is built into our lives.

Tonika believes that, “Art provides an entry point for people to talk about difficult issues. How are we going to improve our country? It can be done through personal relationships and shared passions. Art does this.” Her website, foldedmapproject.com will take you deep into aspects of this expansive resonant community work, where her art is completed by neighborhood encounters.

Tonika employs language that includes everyone and labels no one.

She talks about structural racism that has captured us all, never calling anyone racist. I have pored over Tonika Johnson’s engrossing web12. Tonika Johnson, 6330 N. site to see how she communicates Paulina, 2017 about her work because I have been 13. Tonika Johnson, Hermitimpressed with how she brings so age - Maurice, 2017

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Tonika Johnson

6330 N. Paulina 16” x 20” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017

Together 24” x 36” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017

6329 S. Paulina 16” x 20” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017

Wade on Nanette’s Porch 18” x 24” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017

6720 N. Ashland 16” x 20” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017 6720 S. Ashland 16” x 20” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017 Hermitage - Jon & Paula 18” x 24” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017 Hermitage - Maurice 18” x 24” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017 Nanette on Wade’s Porch 18” x 24” gallery acrylic sandwich 2017

Tonika Lewis Johnson is a photographer/social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She is also co-founder of two community-based organizations, Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, that mobilize people and resources for positive change in Greater Englewood. Her multi-media project titled “Folded Map” that illustrates Chicago’s residential segregation while bringing residents together to have a conversation, was exhibited at Loyola University’s Museum of Art in 2018. Since then she has transformed this project into an advocacy and policy-influencing tool that invites audiences to open a dialogue and question how we are all socially impacted by racial

Artist Residency June 10 - 14, 2021

and institutional conditions that segregate the city. She recently formalized the Folded Map project into a non-profit organization where she serves as the Creative Executive Officer. She is also a member of the Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events by the Chicago City Council and was named one of Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago in 2019. Most recently, she was selected to be the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator to work on her next project “Inequity for Sale,” highlighting the living history of Greater Englewood homes sold on Land Sale Contracts in the 50’s and 60’s.

Justin Schmitz

Looking at dissonance again, I found Justin Schmitz’s photographs of teenage boys playing war games both stunning and jarring. In the Mist shows us fictional violence in the game of Airsoft played in the suburban forests of Chicago.

The weapons are replicas, not real guns. The photographs look like an unsettling combination of cartoons and real battles carried out by child soldiers, which they are not. Justin Schmitz’s videos and still images from the past fifteen years show the vulnerabilities of suburban white teenagers as they make transitions to adulthood. We see kids talking with each other about dating and dreams and cheering at football games.

The difference in this current project, In the Mist, is guns. No longer are we focused on the everyday realities of growing up as seen in his earlier videos and photographs. In this project, we see guns in every frame. The war games are fantasy, but the gun skills the teenagers are learning are real. Justin is not as worried as some might be about the fantasy war games because the games really are fiction. These games are like “video games and heavy metal”, he says. Part of what interests Justin is the way that he

can accentuate color by using color smoke grenades in his pictures like the ones that the players use, so in some ways, his pictures while revealing certain truths about the games he is photographing also become his own fictions.

In Justin Schmitz’s video, War Games 2020, where Airsoft players recount the plots of their favorite war movies, I watch closely, looking and listening for clues about the players’ attitudes about guns. I see that there is no elevation of violence here, rather these really are pretend games, just as this morning my fiveyear old granddaughter offered me a piece of plastic pizza on Facetime.

But are they the same, her offering and theirs? The artist is interested in the American idea of righteous violence, the idea that we Americans are the good guys with the right values and we need to use guns to fight the bad guys. He points out that none of the wars fought in his 39 years have the World War II beliefs about liberating people for freedom, rather America has shifted from liberation to self-interest and occupation. His pictures ask us to consider questions about teenage war play shaped by video games and what that play means in our larger culture.

14. Justin Schmitz, Apparition, 2019

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Justin Schmitz

Loadout #7 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Wolfpack 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Advanced Targeting System 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 21x14”

Rollout 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x52”

Boundary 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 21x14”

Nocturnal 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x15”

Apparition 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28”

Hit 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Loadout #9 (Run) 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Smoke 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28”

Guise 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28”

Target Practice 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 13x20”

Cover 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28”

Twilight Factor 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Aftermath (Molon labe) 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Loadout #11 (Black-Ops III) 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Loadout #15 (Night Vision) 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28”

Death Card 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20”

Medic 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 30x20” Alpha Strike Force 2019 Archival Inkjet Print 42x28” (Individual Frames) Total Dyptich W - 42x56.5”

Justin Schmitz is a Chicago based Photographer. He was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship by the Yale University School of Art and the Tierney Fellowship for Excellence in Photography by the Tierney Family Foundation. Justin is also the recipient of The City of Chicago Community Artist Assistance Program Grant, The Union Civic and Art League Scholarship, and The Albert P. Wiesman Scholarship.

He was a finalist for the Honickman First Book Prize at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the Photography Book Now Prize. His work is part of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and Archive and

Artist Residency May 19 - 29, 2021

was included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photography Project His work has been including in screenings at Rencontres Internationales: New Cinema and Contemporary Art in Paris and Berlin Flat Earth Film Festival in Iceland and screened at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. Schmitz has exhibited around Chicago at C33, The Coat Check Gallery, Gardenfresh, Heaven Gallery, the Evanston Biennial, and Version Festival. His work has been exhibited elsewhere including The Aperture Foundation and Yale University School of Art.

Christina Seely

In contrast to Justin’s jarring images, Christina Seely probes issues of climate change and creates works of formal beauty. Through her collaboration with scientists she brings us stories that pull the viewer into recognizing the complexities of climate change in our lives right now. Embedded in all her work is a concern for media and how photographs incompletely and unrealistically convey information about the natural world. We think we understand it because the conventional pictures we see are beautiful, but they are far removed from the realities of extreme weather and polluting forces. Christina grew up in California and sees the devastating wildfires occurring there, so she feels the danger personally.

Just as Krista Wortendyke’s work challenges media images of violence, Christina’s work challenges media images of the natural world.

The receding frames in Quantitare express the loss of understanding of scale, so hard to read above the tree line in the Arctic North, where she was in Svalbard Territory, a group of islands between Norway and the North Pole, also where she made the original fox picture.

The first time I met Christina Seeley in 2015, we talked about her climate

change concerns and some of the projects she had done. The memory that stayed with me from that initial meeting was about a white fox she encountered in the Arctic North.

She felt kinship with it, a deep connection to this small wild creature so different from herself. Now I realize that there is more to the story than her feeling of kinship. As her label reads, “The arctic fox, Vulpes Lagopus, is a coat-changing species now out of synch with new climate patterns leaving it bright white and vulnerable on the brown tundra for weeks at a time on each end of the winter coat-changing season.” This additional information is typical of Christina’s work because it gets to the complexity of the subject.

Christina’s Dissonance video on view in this exhibition is a quiet meditation on the fragility and vulnerability of the earth. She holds the ice in her hand, squeezing it until it melts and her hand is numb and the ice is gone. She works to free us from being numb to the dangers of our disturbed earth in ways more meditative than accusatory. At the heart of her work is her own deep connection to the earth and its creatures.

15. Christina Seely, Quantitare - glacies (Exponential Ice, Gully Breen / Svalbard Territory), 2019 16. Christina Seely, Dissonance, 2019

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Christina Seely

Species Impact: Arctic - Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus) 2012-2016 Daguerreotype 4.25 x 5 Inches Species Impact: Tropics - Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) 2012-2016 Daguerreotype 4.25 x 5 Inches

Defluo Animalis - Humanae 2012 46x58 Inches Archival Inkjet prints Defluo Animalis . Vulpes Lagopus 2011 16x20 Inches/ 16x20 Inches Archival Inkjet Prints

Quantitare - glacies (Exponential Ice, Gully Breen / Svalbard Territory) Next of Kin: Jaguar, Panthera 2019 onca - Near Threatened x11 Archival Inkjet Prints - each 2016 mounted on 2ply matt board to Kinetic Mirrored Lightbox (twobuild dimension, back print way-mirror, LED light panel, Dura- mounted to diabond and hung tran, frame, plug/hardware) with cleat system 24x30 Inches 46.5 x 37.4 Inches Next of Kin: Sable Antelope, Hippotragus niger - Vulnerable 2016 Kinetic Mirrored Lightbox (twoway-mirror, LED light panel, Duratran, frame, plug/hardware) 24x30 Inches Defluo Animalis - Odobenus Rosmarus 2012 46x58 Inches Archival Inkjet prints

Dissonance 2019 4K single-channel video installation 32 min

Christina Seely is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary photographic practice stretches into the fields of science, design, installation and sound and culminates in a range of visual and collaborative translations. She has a broad national and international exhibition record and is featured in many public and private collections including; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The West Collection and The Walker Art Center. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, and Lightwork in Syracuse, NY, a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a participant on the Arctic Circle Program (Svalbard Territory), as well as a recipient of a year long Public Arts Commission from the city of San Francisco. She received a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research

Artist Residency July 21 - 30, 2021

Fellowship, her first monograph Lux, was co-published in 2015 by Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Photography and she was a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. Her exhibition Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction Through An Artist’s Lens opened at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2017 which led with related research to a 2020 Environmental Humanities Fellowship at University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

She received a BA from Carleton College, an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and is an Associate Professor in the Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH. She is currently represented

by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Violence in media images, war games for teenagers, understanding racism through sharing of experiences of neighborhoods and drawing up quiet spaces within ourselves to feel our connection to the earth: these are the explorations in this exhibition, Dissonance and Resonance, all connected by these four photographers’ passionate caring for our life together now in this moment.

Learn more about the artists’ work at these websites: kristawortendyke.com tonijphotography.com justinschmitzphotography.com christinaseely.com

Terry Evans The prairie ecosystem has been a guide for Terry Evans since 1978.

She 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. She has recently been photographing a particular Bur Oak tree on the Wooded Island in Jackson Park and protected prairies in the Midwest.

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 Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art,Hirshhorn Museum of Art and many more. Terry Evans has five books including Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans and Prairie Stories. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of an Anonymous is a Woman award.

A heartfelt thank you to the “SAC Circle of Patrons” for their generosity: Bill and Jane Alsop

Jeff and Paula Knox

Bob and Marcia Anderson

Mary V. Lemon

Roy and Donice Applequist

Dahx and Colleen Marrs

Mike and Mary Nell Beatty

Joe and Mary Lou McKenzie

Bennington State Bank

Robert and Kim Moeller

Bruce and Marilyn Benyshek

Sallie and Richard Morrison

Mike and Debra Berkley

Dusty and Wendy Moshier

Karen Black

Bill and Kathleen Pierson

Blue Beacon International, Inc.

Martha Rhea

Shannon and Jo Buchanan

Sid and Susy Reitz

Bill and Ruth Cathcart-Rake

John and Alison Riekhof

Clark, Mize & Linville, Chartered

Rex and Carol Romeiser

Mark and Angie Coble

Bob and Linda Salem

John and Debbie Divine

Salina Vortex Corp.

Bob and Mary Exline

Mary Shaffer

Jerry and Carol Exline

Boyd and Heather Smith

Rob and Kelli Exline

Morrie and Sydney Soderberg

Jeff and Lynn Gillam

Melanie Terrill and Mike Soetaert

Great Plains Periodontics

Connie Stevens

John and Kristin Gunn

Marilyn and Dan Stone

James and Brigid Hall

Paula Fried and Brad Stuewe

Saralyn Reece Hardy

Keir and Ashley Swisher

Matt and Brenda Hemmer

Harley Hamilton and Guy Walker

Wes and Joan Jackson

Patricia Traxler and Pat Wallerius

George Jerkovich

Mark and Carolyn Wedel

Peter and Sara Johnston

Gary and Mary Anne Weiner

Mark and Carolee Jones

Margie Wilson

Gary and Lana Jordan

Mary Berkley and Eryn Wright

Paul and Carol Junk

Travis and Melanie Young

thank you 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.

Salina Art Center is a nonprofit contemporary art and education center founded in 1978 in Salina, Kansas. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1991, the Art Center’s mission is “to create exchanges among art, artists, and audiences that reveal life.” Supporters include artists, educators, and community members who envision a center to engage people in art experiences of quality, relevance, and significance to our global community. A heartfelt thank you to our patrons, sustainers, advocates, and benefactors for their generosity.

Salina Art Center is supported in part by donors, members, underwriters, foundations, the City of Salina, the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

events Virtual Curator Talk with Terry Evans May 19, 2021 | 12 pm Artist Talk with Justin Schmitz May 20, 2021 | 6 pm Folded Map Project Film Screening and Discussion with Tonika Johnson June 10, 2021 | 6 pm Lunch & Learn Salina’s Segregated History & the Salina Map June 16, 2021 Artist Talk with Krista Wortendyke July 8, 2021 | 6 pm Closing Reception with special guest Terry Evans July 23, 2021 | 6 pm Artist Talk with Christina Seely July 27, 2021 | 12 pm

Catalog published by Salina Art Center Inc. to accompany the exhibition, Dissonance and Resonance | Four Photographers Salina Art Center, 242 S. Santa Fe Ave, Salina, Kansas May 5 - July 25, 2021 Closing Reception - July 23, 2021

Text by Terry Evans Design by Abby Crawford All images courtesy of the artists Exhibition design by Terry Evans, Ruth Moritz, Daniel Picking, and Marc Durfee