 First, I just wanted to say a few thank yous to Jasper Hill Farms for donating their artisan cheeses and for Orca who is going to be filming the artist tonight. So tonight we have Elliott Berg and Athena Petra Thesenopoulos and Elliott is going to go first and then I will introduce Athena later. Elliott is a freelance photographer from Middlesex, Vermont. In 2018 he traveled to Havana, Cuba and he took these beautiful portraits of musicians and people on the street and dancers and we are so fortunate to have them here and he's going to tell you a little bit about them tonight. Thank you. So I would like to sort of take a running start on this show by looking back, I'm going to take three minutes or so, to look back on work that I've done earlier because what runs through all of my work is, I mean my favorite subjects you can tell are people and I feel sort of an affinity or an attraction to potential subjects that I see whether they're in a concert or on the street or at a baseball game. When I walk around this exhibit I get a little emotional because there's a story behind each photograph. So I wanted to go back and say a little bit about the work that I've done over the last number of years. In the mid-1980s I did my first photographic portrait project. My wife August and I lived in a small Bolivian village for a year and I did a series of portraits of people in the village, our neighbors. And that series was actually exhibited at Ginny's Restaurant Horn of the Moon and also at the original Wood Art Gallery up on the hill. And what that, putting that exhibit together helped me do was focus my attention on what I wanted to communicate when I photographed somebody. That I was interested in finding something important or essential or indicative or unique about my subject. And our neighbor, the knitter, this pose was, you know, it was her in the same way that when I did my series on senior track and field athletes, the energy and the dedication, the sort of impressive accomplishment of those athletes, that's what I wanted to communicate to people who saw the exhibits. In the same way, the romance of dancers in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a series I did subsequently. The brutality and beauty of a young female boxer defending her golden gloves title. The life experience reflected in the face of a farmer in Myanmar from a series of portraits of women that I did in that country. The sort of backbreaking history, if you will, of Ukraine where I went to do a roots project that became a show called Ellie's Town. And the joy of resistance in a series of photographs that I took at the National Women's Marches in Washington. Okay, so that brings me to Cuba where I was last year at this time. And David Garten is in the audience here and he's an important figure in this show because before I went to Cuba, I had this idea that I needed some structure for what I was going to do. I expected to be on the street every day for hours taking photographs and that was fine but I needed a little bit more direction. And David helped me find a drum teacher, a conga teacher, which is why this show is called conga. And every other day I would walk the 20 or 25 minutes through the streets of central Havana to the home of Adele Casuso, a wonderful percussionist who was my teacher and my entree to the music world in Havana. Those were his hands and this is his group, Bakuleye, which was a great salsa band. They put on their satin robes for me at the time so I could photograph them. One of the first things I did when I got to Havana, David, you will remember, we went out, we overlapped our time in Cuba by half a day and we went out on the street and we did some shooting and we went over to a place called Teatro Campo Amor, the Field of Love Theater, where I took this photograph of Reynaldo who was a man who had been living in this ruined classical theater just across the way from the National Capitol building and he had been told recently that he had to move out because the government was going to renovate the building and he was so filled with sadness at the time. There was something profound about his melancholy and that's what I wanted to convey here. Reynaldo, next to this kind of skeleton of a chair, David, you will remember the whole scene there. Each of the photographs has some element I would suggest that is important in conveying what is special about the subject. So here at the other end of the mood spectrum is Miguel the barber who lived just down the street from the room that I rented from David and Miguel welcomed the world into his barbershop as you can see and he welcomed everything he could possibly fit into his barbershop, into his barbershop. And so you could spend a fair amount of time trying to identify all of the individual objects that are in this photograph including not really an object but in the mirror on the left is part of the face of the mother of the boy who's getting a haircut. I spent half a day photographing a rehearsal of the Ban Rara dance troupe. It's a ballet and folkloric group with 20 of the most gorgeous men and women you've ever seen in your life and extremely talented. And so the beauty and the emotion of their dancing is what I tried to capture there. It was a bit of a technical challenge because the theater was very dimly lit but there was one door that opened onto a side street that had this shaft of tropical light that came in. So as the dancers passed through the light I would photograph them. Some of the photographs were completely serendipitous. I stepped off the ferry that you take across Havana Bay and in the ferry building was a painter in a frame. Not a painting in a frame but a painter in a frame and I had a long opportunity to take a number of poses. It took me two days to find this skateboard. I'm not going to call it a park venue. Like so many places that I photograph like the theater where Ronaldo was. The physical infrastructure is really in ruins but the life and the talent and the energy that you see in those settings is just extraordinary. And the explosive nature of this skateboarder into the graffiti is what I was trying to capture. Some of the special elements in these photographs really have to do with things like color. And so this photograph that I call the initiate, I love the palette. It's the grays, sort of a mauve color, the greens, obviously his white umbrella and clothes. Really just, it was a different look from most of what you see in Havana. This is closer to sort of the core, what I feel is the core of Havana which is bright color. Primary colors set against a gray wall and another sort of color element. There was a street that had been roped off for an elementary school group of kids to play and they drew circles in the street. It was a kind of tag game that they were playing and if you got to the circle you were safe. And these two girls ran together and obviously close friends held each other and the juxtaposition of the two arms and the skin tones was really impactful for me. And I felt that this was somehow at least metaphorically reflective of the diversity of race in Cuba and what seems to be a pretty harmonious relationship that people of all backgrounds have. This photograph is quirky. The quirkiness is what makes it for me. I was walking in a suburb of Havana and I came across Alejandro and incongruously he was up on a wall. It's just like a shelf on a wall on the street and he had this gigantic boom box and he was sitting there as if that was the most ordinary thing in the world and I spoke with him for a while and took some photographs and I just thought, wow. How did that happen? This is one of my favorite photographs. I call it jugando solito playing alone. Again another sort of burned out building. I don't want to overemphasize that but the economy is really challenged in Cuba in no small part because of U.S. government action. But I came across this boy who was playing and again another kind of juxtaposition of red shirt, blue shorts and a soccer ball in the air against this gray wall. It just made it. It was an instant in time in his life that I felt I was preserving for him. And then there's a photograph that I call Salseros. So it's salsa dancers and this was taken in an outdoor venue, the iconic Salón Rosado Benimore. Benimore was a famous band leader, Cuban band leader in the 40s and 50s and the music and the dancing on this outdoor floor so it would look like a gigantic skating rink. It's concrete and then there's a balcony around the top where you can watch the dancers. It was just incredible. You could not refrain from dancing. And so I found myself a partner and I danced. I wanted to finish with a couple of thoughts, a couple of slides. David, you recognize Bayardo? David Garten introduced me to Bayardo. His photograph is not here but he sort of took me under his wing on a few days. We went to his little farm outside of Havana. He introduced me to his wife and kids. I took them out to dinner. He got me into the baseball game which is the last photo there where there's a visiting player who's hitting a home run against the Havana industriales like the nail in the coffin of a really bad season on the part of the home team. For me, photography is essentially a communicative process. It's magical in the sense that you can see what I saw here. I can select the photographs, the subjects, I can frame them, crop them as I want but these are the people that I saw and you can see them and the communication in my view should go both ways in the sense that I'm interested in what you have to say about these photographs. So I'm going to be here for a while to answer questions. Please, there's a guest book in the back if you have any comments. Fill that out. I've got business cards there and these photographs are for sale in this format or framed under glass so you have that option and thank you very much for coming tonight. It's been a kick. So Athena is a mixed media collage artist and a fine art photographer. She collects cabinet card portraits from the 19th and 20th century and hopefully she'll tell us what cabinet cards are exactly. By reinventing these antiquated portraits which she covers them in wax and inscribes the surfaces to create different textures and she gives the portraits a new life and a new identity and a new time. So we're honored to have Athena tonight. Thank you. Looks like it's working. Thanks for coming out everyone. I'm Athena. So I am a mixed media artist. I work in a variety of media from paper to encaustic and also textiles. The heart of everything that I do is based on cabinet card and card to visite portraiture. So I gave you a little bit of a mini history lesson here. Card to visite photography was first introduced in 1854. They're the really tiny old vintage photos you might find in antique stores or maybe even you have a collection from old relatives. They were often traded among friends and visitors during the Victorian era and collections were publicly displayed usually. By the early 1870s, the larger cabinet card measuring about four and a half by six and a half replaced the cart to visite. So I give you a couple of samples here. I collect these old photographs and scan them and repurpose them for my work. So I thought I would talk a little bit about my process because that tends to be the major question that I get is how do you turn that into this? So I thought I'd talk about my works on paper which you can see a few of the framed pieces here behind you. They all begin with the original photograph. I then scan them and alter them digitally. I like to think of it almost like I'm creating an underpainting but digitally. So the image that's here in the middle is a photographic print. You can see I've masked out certain areas that I know I want to color by hand and areas where I'm going to be illustrating on them. So then the final image here is the final print that you'll see on the wall behind you. So I flesh out these digital composites by adding hand embellishments in graphite, wax, pastel, acrylic, sometimes watercolor, directly to my print. I print on a heavy matte paper. It's kind of similar to a watercolor paper so it takes the paint really well. And I thought I'd give you guys a little glimpse into my studio. I'm working on a few pieces here, painting them by hand. And again, you can sort of see the various stages of the process here. The upper left image is the straight print, the straight digital composite. You can see I've got a couple little wax pastels in the foreground here. The image right below it, I've applied a layer of black paint. And then the larger image is the finished piece hanging on my wall. So again, this is a piece called Trinity. It's hanging up behind you here. I thought I'd give you a start to finish look at the process. This image really compelled me. All of my subjects are anonymous. I don't really know exactly who they are or what their story is, so I like to kind of give them a story. These three women looked like sisters to me. They felt like they had an important bond. I could sort of see some facial similarities. So I really wanted to sort of honor that connection and keep them together for my final composition. I'm also kind of inspired by religious iconography. My father is Greek, so I grew up visiting lots of small little Greek Orthodox churches and all of the little villages that we would visit. And I like to think of these sort of a secular iconography, more just a celebration of the human spirit. So again, a few process shots. So keep in mind the original photographs that I scan are fairly small, usually about like this, if not really, really teeny tiny. One thing that I found when I scan them, I can alter their size. So I blew this one up to about 16 by 20, so her face became very, very enlarged. And I liked what happened over here. You can see some of the textures of the old paper. I just thought that was incredibly lovely, and it felt very aged and vintage. Here's another example. This was a piece that I actually created. It was a commission for Elle Japan magazine. I was asked to create a series of nine images for an astrology spread that they were doing. Unfortunately, this one didn't make the cut. They said she looked too old. But I really loved her facial expression. I thought she carried a particular strength and a stoicism about her. One of the wonderful things about working from scanned photography is that I can reuse a subject over and over and sort of alter my composition. All of my works on paper are also in small editions, but they vary by all of the handwork that I create. So this is the same image. It's called radial. The one on the left is a very small print. It's about four by five inches, and the one on the right is large. It's about 16 by 20. So even though they're part of the same edition, they vary quite a bit. I love the different emotions that can come out just by changing colors or texture or pattern. So I've been working on paper quite a bit, and I decided that I wanted to experiment with some different materials. A lot of the very faint graphite line work that I was doing reminded me a lot of hand stitching, so I thought why don't I actually try to work with fabric and do some stitching. So you can see the evolution of the original photograph and the paper piece that I did, and then I decided I would try to recreate her using textiles. She's over here. So to begin my process working with fabric, first I print the image directly onto fabric, and then I use a heat fusing material to bond them to other layers of fabric. It's basically like creating collage, but instead of using paper, I'm using textiles. The composition is then stitched directly onto stretched canvas. So here's a few process shots, and here's another piece that I did. The upper left image is me just sort of laying out my bits and pieces of materials to try to figure out my composition, and then it's stitched to the canvas on the right-hand side here. The other work that you'll see on the walls is my encaustic work. So it's a similar process to the textile pieces that I do. It's an analog collage, but instead of using fabric on canvas, I use paper mounted directly to wood panel, and then a layer of wax is applied over top. So for those of you who aren't familiar with encaustic medium, it's a combination of beeswax and damar resin. The beeswax comes in little pellets, and the damar resin are these lovely little crystals that smell kind of like a pine tree. So you combine them all and heat them up to a liquid state, and then it can be brushed directly onto your wooden panel. And what I love so much about the wax is its translucency, but it's also very malleable, and you can carve directly into the surface. Since the wax is translucent, you can't really see any of the drawings until you apply some paint to create contrast. So that's the next stage of the process for me. Here I am putting some black paint onto my piece. This is the part that's a little nerve-wracking because it gets really, really messy, and then you have to just clean it up and stay calm. I also use a razor blade to sort of scrape the surfaces down to get them nice and smooth. And the best part about the wax is if you're unhappy with what you've done, you can use your heat gun, heat it up, and scrape it all off and start over again. So here are a couple of shots from the initial collage to the finished and caustic piece, and another before and after shot, and that's it. So I'm happy to take any questions. Bring it on. I have a question for Elliot. I was really interested in the care that you spend or kind of put toward the individuals in your work, and I was wondering how you handle kind of the sensitivity of being an outsider and coming from the outside into different places and how you find that entry point and do you find it through making those personal connections or how do you kind of bridge that gap? My kids who are now adult sons, this drives them a little bit crazy, but I just put myself out there in what I think is a non-threatening and respectful way. And I don't assume that anybody that I see is, you know, owes me anything. I'm there and this is their place. This is their home. And so I would go out on the street for, as I said, for hours kind of with my photographic eyes on looking for images that I thought would be appropriate and artistic and I looked for signals. I mean, some of the photographs you can tell, for example, Slash of Color, I had three seconds to take the photograph of that woman looking the other way. I didn't go up and engage her in conversation. On the other hand, with Alejandro or the people at the dance recital or obviously Adele Casuso, my dance instructor, I interacted with them. Again, you have to be really modest about it. You have to understand that you are their guest and then you take the photographs. There are some parts of the world where people are very open to being photographed and there are other parts of the world where culturally it's not acceptable and so you need to know where the line is. I don't know. Did I answer your question? Were some of these photographs, people never knew that they had been photographed? Correct. So there's really a continuum, sort of portraiture on one end and street photography on the other and I see the work that I do is intersecting those two but obviously you're in different places at different times with different subjects. I just want to comment too, since the first time I saw your work over at West Branch, I'm totally captivated by the ability with these tiny faces that are really disembodied completely and you have so much humanity. Kind of a little choked up actually. I think that's definitely my goal is to honor these people. It's a little sad when you find stacks and stacks of beautiful, beautiful imagery of people that for whatever reason they've been abandoned, you know, families move, clean out their closets, their attics. Their identities are completely forgotten and so even though I don't necessarily know their story, I think we can still honor them. We're sort of just honoring the human spirit because this is, we're all going through this together. It's really giving them a new life. Your artistry around your design is just gorgeous. The question is sort of for both of you. So whenever I go into shows like this I always try to find connections whether intentional or otherwise and I'm immediately drawn to the faces and the two bodies of the work and how yours are from the past and even though it's not as long, Elliot's is also from the past in a way and that linear track will continue over time and it's sort of a similar way and have either of you talked about the thought about that connection since you've been paired up with this? I guess I think about the perseverance of the human spirit. With my work it's sort of about choosing to continue to remember the legacy of these people who've gone on before us and with Elliot's work, you know, I see people living rich, beautiful, colorful lives, you know, despite adversity. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we've had a little bit of time to interact, we hung our shows, actually you were not there, I thought it was your husband but at the opening and today we had a long talk and there is a lot that connects the two exhibits even though the media are very different and particular subjects are very different so I'm really, you know, honored to share the gallery space with you. What do you think it shows with the difference between people in the more contemporary setting maybe being aware of how being photographed makes them feel or act or whether they notice it or not and maybe you think most of these maybe the people might not have had that experience so it seems like maybe they all kind of have that similar like I'm not really sure what's happening here. You talked about honoring people, honoring these people from the past and I think that's really what I wanted to do when I went to Cuba is to honor people in Cuba. I had been there one time before and I decided this time I wanted to go on my own and be on the street and sort of just be out there and honor them, it's a hard life in Cuba and people have really made the most of it. I think to sort of the way Eliot's subjects are so comfortable in front of the camera versus the way mine seemed a bit more rigid it kind of speaks to the development of technology and the fact that photography is such a new medium when you think of painting and carving sculpture really it just became a thing in the 1800s so there was I think often a bit of fear or people tended to be a bit more timid when they had their portrait taken. Exactly, not to mention that the technology was not quite as advanced so people would be sitting for a long period of time for an exposure. I've even found as I've been collecting these vintage photos you could find portraits where there's a bit of like a brace exposed so people would have to sit very still and often times there'd be these metal fixtures that would keep them in place and now we're photographed all the time that we kind of don't even think about it we're being photographed right now and so we're becoming quite a bit more I guess desensitized too and comfortable. People have thrown away their braces. Right. We're taking selfies. I think they were all similar important. You got one photograph done and then you traded cards. It's like selfies, right? Look at me, look at me. Hey, I want you. Put them all on the wall. It was a privilege to go and sit for a photographer and actually cover portraits. Every day. Did you find a lot of other American photographers wandering around with their cameras taking pictures of people so that people were just I mean if I were sitting in my front yard and somebody came along with the camera and started training it on me I'd notice them. I mean honestly in my meanderings I didn't see many American photographers but there was one at the Rafael Trejo Jim who told me about the skateboard venue that I had trouble finding. There was David and the two of us went out shooting on the street but I didn't seem like there were swarms of people on the other hand where David lives in Havana and where I stayed and spent most of my time it's not really the tourist section of town at all but it's intensely rich and that's where I wanted to be. Thank you so much.