Included in this gallery is our piece and the press release for this unique exhibition. It is multimedia and akin to a game of telephone. Participants were sent a copy of an artist’s work, in this case a song, and asked to provide our interpretation of it in our medium, photography. Our work was then sent to another artist, of which we knew nothing. All was revealed to the public on Monday, April 20, 2015; 315 artists from around the world participated.
We have been interviewed about our piece and participation in the project by Melena Ryzik, a staff reporter for the NY Times, for a story she wrote about the
Telephone project. Her article, titled "Psst, Look at This. Now, Pass It On," published Sunday April 19 and "Telephone: An International Arts Experiment by Nathan Langston" published online Thursday, April 16. [
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/arts/design/telephone-an-international-arts-experiment-by-nathan-langston.html]
Our image is a pinhole photograph on film, scanned. It is titled
Ashes. This work was inspired by a musical piece that gave us a sense of memory and dreams – what was lost and what might be. That led us to work with a pinhole camera for its depth of field in the center and softer focus toward the edges, to create a dream-like image shot in a fire-damaged area near Bastrop, Texas in the winter of 2014.
The
Telephone project was an enjoyable challenge that was neither difficult nor easy. We spent many days listening to the piece we were sent, trying to understand what the artist was conveying. We found ourselves very involved with the musical artist’s interpretation. (Were we getting it right?) Then we realized that we never look at any art that way. We either like it or we don’t. Sometimes we don’t even agree on that but, in this case, agreed that we both liked the piece. We began to talk about how it made us feel, what we liked and what were some of the elements that tied those things together. That is what we tried to put into our work.
© Terri St.Arnauld & Frank Yezer 2017
