New Exhibit — Arizona! People & Places

Silence has reigned again, at least here on the blog, for the past few weeks. I’ve been absolutely head-down working at the day job, and with two major streams of activity coming out of the Arizona – Alberta photography exchange project that I worked on this year with photographers Peter Carroll, Ken Ross and Colleen Miniuk-Sperry.

One major source of to-do list items was getting a new non-profit up & running — The IRIS Photographic Society of Alberta. In addition to calling to mind the eye and the aperture of a camera, “IRIS” stands for Inspiring Respect through Images and Stories. Pete & I had such an amazing experience on the exchange project this year, we wanted to create the opportunity for other photographers to experience something similar. And we wanted to extend the reach of the resulting photography and story-telling about cross-cultural understanding more broadly into our community. IRIS will be the vehicle to enable this to happen. After months of work, including able assistance from our co-founders Kerry Smith, Samantha Chrysanthou and Darwin Wiggett, IRIS is now officially live — whew! Please head over to the IRIS site to find out more; we’ll have a lot to say about this in the future, and most of it will be posted on the IRIS site.

As I wrote at IRIS’ brand-new online home, we had a great launch exhibit for our Arizona – Alberta project down at the Art Intersection Gallery in Gilbert, Arizona. Meanwhile, back on the home front, Pete & I have continued to be super busy with the second major stream of work. Aside from getting IRIS up & running, we’ve been putting together a set of Calgary-based exhibits of work also coming out of the 2012 Arizona – Alberta exchange project.

Exhibit: January 4 – February 2, 2013. Framed on Fifth, 1207 – 5 Avenue N.W., Calgary. Gallery hours 10:00 – 6:00 Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 – 5:00 Saturday.
Artist Reception: Friday, January 4, 5:00 – 9:00 PM.

The first Calgary exhibit will be a showing of new work that Pete & I made in Arizona. The show is free & open to all; it is a commercial show, so if you see something you like, you’ll have the opportunity to purchase a print.

This event will run from January 4 – February 2, 2013 in the art gallery portion of the Framed on Fifth framing studio. Hannah and Patricia at the studio have been a big help to us, providing a lot of insight on putting our shows together as well as doing a fantastic job with all of our framing work. Pete & I are very pleased to have this exhibit opportunity, and we invite anyone to come and get a break from winter in Calgary by looking at some Arizona summer photography. 🙂

In fact, if you’re in Calgary on the show’s opening evening, please plan to visit the gallery between 5:00 and 9:00. Pete & I will be on hand to talk about the project and our work; we’d love to meet anyone who can drop by and share some refreshments and appetizers. Mark your calendars now for Friday, January 4 — we hope to see you then!