July 1, 2021- August 21, 2021 — Feel Good Pictures Laura Hart Newlon

July 1 - August 21, 2021 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 1, 5-8PM
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12pm-3pm and by appointment. Email specialist.gallery@gmail.com or DM us on instagram (@specialist_sea) for inquiries.

Join us to celebrate Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair and the official return of Pioneer Square First Thursday Art Walk

Specialist is pleased to announce our participation in Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair on Thursday, August 5! Open gallery hours from 5pm-8pm.

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Specialist presents Feel Good Pictures, new works by Laura Hart Newlon. In this exhibition, Newlon draws from two bodies of work–Heavy Focus and postures and slips–which center the persistence of the haptic in both digital and analogue image production.  

Heavy Focus, a single-channel video, weaves together ideas of tactility, visibility and the body, and the material conditions of image-making. Disembodied hands carefully collage and layer physical photographic prints, while other images are manipulated within a digital workspace. Drawing from a wide variety of idiosyncratic sources including architectural theory, vintage beauty tutorials, phenomenology, archaeological studies of Venus figurines, stock images and the artist’s own photographic archives, Heavy Focus explores seeing as a sensual act that plays out both tenderly and forcefully upon bodies. 

postures and slips, an ongoing series of glass plate positives, extends the language of collage by marrying the 19th century wet plate collodion process with gathered windows on digital screens. Draped materials, abbreviated bodies and virtual workspaces combine in tenuous arrangements to suggest provisional order and structure, while examining both historical and contemporary image production with insight and humor. Inscribed in glass, the resulting ambrotypes and tintypes strip away context yet root each arrangement in an adamantly material present. 

Together, the work in Feel Good Pictures foregrounds the physicality of pictures, seeing as a sensual act, and the embodiment of image production. Through manual manipulation and dexterous manufacture, Newlon reminds us that the virtual is always real, even if it is not always actual.

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Laura Hart Newlon is a lens-based artist and writer whose recent work explores digital materiality and conditions of visibility related to image-making.  Newlon has exhibited her work at various museums, galleries and artist-run spaces nationally, with recent exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), SOIL (Seattle) and LVL3 (Chicago), and her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection and Photographic Center Northwest. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington. Her kids love bagels, yard waste, and aggressive hammock rides, and sometimes throw debris at you; don’t take it personally. Newlon lives in Seattle where she is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts.