Axle Contemporary

E Pluribus Unum: El Norte

 

August 26 - October 23, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

 

This will be the fifth in our ongoing series of E Pluribus Unum projects throughout New Mexico. We plan to visit communities spread across the northern part of the state: Los Alamos, Santa Clara/Kapo Pogeh, Espanola, Okay Owingeh, Pojoaque, Cimarron, Raton, Clayton, Chimayo, Truchas, Penasco, Questa, Costilla, Taos, Dixon, Roy/Mosquero, Tucumcari, Las Vegas, Mora, Abiquiu, Chama, Dulce, and Tierra Amarilla.

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Participation is free to all. Participants bring a small object of personal significance, and enter the mobile studio and sit for a black and white photo portrait while holding the object. The objects brought are as diverse as the participants.

 

Two copies of each portrait are immediately printed with the gallery’s solar-powered printer. One is given to the participant, another is pasted to the exterior of the vehicle, creating a mobile and growing exhibition throughout the span of each regional project.  At the close of each project Axle Contemporary Press publishes a book containing all of the portraits, and one image on the cover blending all off the hundreds of portraits into one face, representing the entirety of the community of participants. After each project the portraits are also exhibited in regional exhibitions.

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More info here.

Sally Blakemore and Andrea Cypress

incognito: discovering Her

 

October 28 - November 20, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

 

This installation is composed of selections from thousands of photographs taken by an anonymous woman in Arizona. The trove of images was found in a yard sale. The artists have selected images and recreated a story about the individual and the culture at large.

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The installation is a tribute to an anonymous life, recorded in snap shot documentation. Her fascination with the medium intrigued her for her entire life. The motivation to become a photographer, most likely came from Kodak marketing in America during the 40s,50s, 60s. She would moist likely not consider herself a photographer, but each photograph was valued, saved, trimmed and stored in tidy albums. If the medium is the message, then in this case, self-identity found in these printed images, become the evidence that she lived.

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