Will Connally | Jenny Fine
RhizomeDC Microcinema
Virtual Screening
Curated by Alicia Little
Thursday, May 6, 2021
7 pm EST
WATCH: https://youtu.be/YHZ-ICqhQqI
DONATE TO THE ARTISTS: withfriends.co/event/10656717/
POST-SCREENING ARTIST Q&A: vcu.zoom.us/j/97642485146

Will Connally, Stoma, 2018, Archival Inkjet Print, 48x35 inches

Will Connally is a photo-based artist whose practice encompasses fiction writing, set design, performance, and installation. In addition to drawing inspiration from personal narratives, his original work is influenced by literary sources, film noir, and amateur theater productions. 

Will Connally, Fur-Lined Coffin (Downriver from Elster), 2019, 48x35", Archival Inkjet Print

In his Lake Elster series of photographs, Connally presents fragments of a narrative that has been unfolding since 2011. Told through the unreliable lens of character Wade Lagarde, the story spans from the 17th century to present day. Specific figures from Wade’s memory inhabit scenes such as the brutal discovery of the lake by French fur-trappers in the 17th century, the ensuing conflict with the native Abenaki Indians, through Alan Welter’s time in his basement workshop and adhesives factory in 1961, on to more contemporary times with the Wolframs and the introduction of Maeve Devlin, who recently happened upon Elster. The narrative fluctuates between the real and surreal, one example being when Wade uncovers writing in Alan’s hand about a coworker named Laszlo Gorov. It is unclear whether Gorov, a dwarf Romanian boxer, actually assisted the elderly man in the factory, or was just a hallucination born of the adhesive fumes. 

Will Connally, Ha'leine, 1669 (Cairn), 2017, Archival Inkjet Print, 48x35 inches

Significant objects in the photographs stand as attributes of characters who are often absent from the images. The inclusion of stage-like, fabricated elements heightens the subjective nature of the narrative and calls into question the veracity of the photographs. The original stories embedded in the images, as remembered by Wade, get further distorted with each new interpretation. In Connally’s experimental narrative work Maeve of Elster, we get a snapshot of two converging timelines revealing the lives of Lake Elster’s inhabitants.

Will Connally received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented his work in exhibitions and lectures across the United States and Canada, has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, and will soon embark on an upcoming residency at Arteles Creative Center in Finland.

www.willconnally.com
@will.connally

Jenny Fine, In Unison, 2018, traveling performance/stop motion video, 2 mi

This video sequence features three of Jenny Fine’s projects including The Keeping Room, In Unison, and The Wake. Through a photographic lens, Fine explores her relationship to history through the landscape of her family farm. The interiors of relative’s homes become a stage on which costumed bodies perform identity. Grounded in the Victorian sentiment that it was better to have an image of your dead child than no image at all, the photographs function as both presence and absence. 

Jenny Fine, The Keeping Room, 2010, multi-media installation, 8mm projection, 5 min

Fine describes: “As I look back on the work I have made, I discover characters emerging and chapters unfolding before me. The ineffable nature of this lived narrative is neither didactic nor linear. Instead it is so many threads and my weaving hands, tying them together: the photograph as time frozen, – the camera, a device capable of shapeshifting memory - and the story – as an apparition moving across time and space, resisting stillness and singularity. My work is to embody stories, to move them forward in resistance to the death a photograph may offer.”

Jenny Fine, The Wake, 2011, 4 mins

Jenny Fine (b. 1981, Enterprise, AL) is a visual artist and professor currently living and working in Alabama. Rooted in the photographic form, Fine’s practice employs time as material in an exploration of both personal and cultural memory, identity, and our shifting relationship to the photograph in our digital, image-saturated age. She received her M.F.A in photography at The Ohio State University (2010) and is currently exhibiting an immersive installation at Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, N.C. 

www.jennyfine.com
@fannieamericus