April 15 – May 26, 2017
GALERIE FOTOLAND
THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE
Location: 1st floor library lobby, outside Photoland
“There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes.”
-Hugh Raffles, Insect-opedia
Gallery Fotoland is honored to present Melinda Hurst Frye’s mysterious and hyperreal photographic series Underneath featuring snails, slugs, ladybugs, and a whole lot of dirt. Underneath depicts the private world beneath our feet. In Hurst Frye’s words, “The surface is not a border, but an entrance to homes, nurseries, highways and graveyards.”
Melinda Hurst Frye has created these photographs in her yard, not with a camera but with a flatbed scanner. The ultra-high resolution scan creates a doorway into the fascinating world below. With images so intriguing you can’t help but wonder what else is going on underground. Some of the smaller more intimate images Hurst Frye has in her Underneath series consist of close ups of rats, caterpillars, spiders, and more. These compliment her bigger landscape photographs by showing how small, big, and delicate life underground can be.
In correlation to the Underneath series, the Evergreen Library is showing Dirt? The exhibition features artist books and poems selected from an international call for entries. The exhibit brilliantly explores soil as earth’s delicately structured biological, geological and chemical skin—something far more complex, life giving and informative than simply dirt, which is what we buy at garden-supply stores or sweep out of our houses.
Melinda Hurst Frye is a Seattle based exhibiting artist, working in themes of implied environments and shared experiences within the still life aesthetic. Her current work, which illustrates the mystery and activity of subterranean ecosystems was featured on Humble Arts Foundation and WIRED photo, and may be seen in various upcoming solo and group exhibitions throughout the Northwest region.
Melinda Hurst Frye holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and is a dedicated member of the Society for Photographic Education. Hurst Frye teaches photography at the Art Institute of Seattle, holds occasional workshops and is an artist member of CORE gallery in Seattle, Washington.