Giving Franklin Park Conservatory a shot

Untitled, by Duncan Snyder

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CCAD Photography Chair Duncan Snyder has curated a new exhibition that sees Columbus College of Art & Design Photography students, alumni, and faculty present a new take on the Franklin Park Conservatory.

The exhibition GlassHouse: Photo Flora Form, on view in the conservatory’s Cardinal Health Gallery through Sunday, Sept. 17, uses the conservatory’s foliage and natural amenities to explore the manipulation of nature through lighting, perspective, and design.

All of the work on view in GlassHouse was made specifically for the exhibition, said Snyder, who is also Interim Chair of Cinematic Arts. Snyder curated the show with the assistance of Amy Schuessler (Photography, 2017).

In addition to creating individual pieces, Snyder and Schuessler also teamed up on collaborative works.

“We decided to shoot at the same time using plastic Holga cameras, which use 120 film rolls. We would go to the space at the same time and we would each take our individual pictures and interact with the space on our own, and then we would come back and we would process our film together and then scan it and analyze it and then make conscious choices to pair one image of hers and one of mine,” Snyder said.

“Then we would pull them back into Photoshop and blend those two images together,” he continued. “We wanted to go to an additive aspect, so we worked with marks and tools, graphite and ink and colored pencil and so forth to kind of bridge the gap between the specific nature of photographs and the less specific nature of the mark.”

As a whole, the works in the show, which range from more traditional photography to salt prints by Professor Hiroshi Hayakawa to works incorporating encaustic and other materials by Professor Helen Hoffelt.

“I think that’s what will be interesting, to reflect upon the whole body of work. All of us are interacting with the very same things, but to see the variety of perceptions of what that means, what we care about, and what we are drawn to is varied,” Snyder said.

He said he is grateful for the level of access the conservatory provided the photographers.

“We could shoot early, we could shoot late, we could shoot beyond regular hours, we could shoot in the private areas. … They’ve been really great about allowing us to be our crazy artist selves,” Snyder said.

CCAD faculty with work in the show are: Hiroshi Hayakawa, Helen Hoffelt, Duncan Snyder, and Claire Wiedman.

Students and alumni with work in the show are: Brittney Combs (Photography, 2016), Ellen Fleetwood (Photography, 2017), Hanna Mendel (Photography, 2018), Annie Noelker (Photography, 2018), Amy Schuessler (Photography, 2017), Kaitlyn Jo Smith (Photography, 2016), and Crystal Tursich (Visual Arts-New Projects, 2012)

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Learn more about CCAD's Photography program or apply here.