Amanda Marchand: Night Garden

Amanda Marchand: Night Garden

Reception: Sunday, November 15, 3 – 5pm

November 15, 2015 – January 16, 2015

Thursday – Saturday, 10am – 4pm, by appointment

Night Garden is a recent series of photographs by New York-based artist and writer Amanda Marchand. This will be the artist’s second solo show at Traywick Contemporary.

Night Garden is a personal narrative about the nature of time and place. While living in Canada to care for her mother in the summer of 2012, Marchand documented her mother’s garden at night while she slept. Rather than using a flash, she chose to experiment with moonlight, porch light and lightning, while using a variety of cameras: digital, analogue and pinhole, with exposure times ranging from a few seconds to several hours. Through her exploration of darkness, Marchand discovers the human narrative of the ever-changing garden, and in the process, reveals the capacity of light to illuminate what would otherwise remain unseen.

A series of poetic landscape portraits, Night Garden presents a world that is simultaneously dark, hopeful and infinite. Shooting from various angles, Marchand places the viewer in the dark and silent garden, experiencing the grass and weeds underfoot as well as the unending stars and sky above. She invites us into this private world to experience our physical connection to the earth and to contemplate what lies beyond.

The Night Garden series was also published as a limited edition, hardcover book in the spring of 2015 by Datz Press, Korea. In the book, Marchand intertwines her images with phrases and text from her poetry, weaving together a narrative of love and loss. Marchand characterizes her work as “deeply personal” and sees this series “as a celebration, as an acceptance of place.”

Prior to the opening of the exhibition at Traywick Contemporary, Marchand will be discussing Night Garden as part of the 14th annual PhotoAlliance lecture series at the San Francisco Art Institute on Friday, November 6 at 7:30 pm.

A native of Montreal, Quebec, Amanda Marchand lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Marchand has many links to the Bay Area, having received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and a Graduate Fellowship Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2002. Marchand is a MacDowell Colony Fellow (Petersborough, NH) and recently completed residencies at Hewnoaks (Lovell, ME) and Arteles Creative Center (Finland). Night Garden has been widely recognized with awards and exhibitions at institutions including Datz Museum (Korea), Palo Alto Art Center (Palo Alto, CA), Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe, NM) and The Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO).

For more information visit, http://www.traywick.com/2015/11/.