Critical Mass 2011

I am so pleased to announce that I made the final list of the top 50 in the Critical Mass competition. This is the 3rd time, and the second year for the Burn series. It was thru my Critical Mass 2009 participation that the Corden Potts Gallery picked me up for representation. It just so happens that Corden Potts is opening a new show this Thursday featuring selected gallery artists and the work of Sharon Beals.

If you haven't seen Sharon Beals work, it is amazing. I am a sucker for life's beginning moments and her work zeros in on it.



From the Gallery show announcement, Sharon is quoted...

"Bird nests, even without knowing which birds constructed them, seem hardly possible," Sharon says. "Creations of spider's web, caterpillar cocoon, plant down, mud, found modern objects, human and animal hair, mosses, lichen, feathers and down, sticks and twigs--all are woven with beak and claw into a bird's best effort to protect their next generation."

Sharon goes on to say, "But survival for so many birds is tenuous in a modern world where habitat loss is as common as the next housing development, and even subtle changes in climate can affect food supply. It is my hope that capturing the detailed art form of the nests in these photographs will gain appreciation for their builders, and inspire their protection."

Sharon photographed nest and egg specimens, collected over the last two centuries, at The California Academy of Sciences, The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and The Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. While few nests are collected today, these nests and eggs are used for research, providing important information about their builder's habitats, DNA, diseases and other survival issues.


I will be showing my Burn No. 49 at the Corden Potts show.

A newer Burn image from the 2011 Critical Mass entry will be traveling in a group show in 2012, curated by Darius Himes, Assistant Director at Fraenkel Gallery to the following locations:
PhotoCenter NW, in Seattle, WA
Newspace Center for Photography, in Portland, OR
RayKo Photo Center, in San Francisco, CA

Other photographers included in the Top 50 are...
Evgenia Arbugaeva
Jessica Auer
Mary Ellen Bartley
Daniel Beltra
Nadine Boughton
Colette Campbell-Jones
Christopher Capozziello/AEVUM
Kirk Crippens
John Cyr
Katrina d'Autremont
Scott Dalton
Christopher Dawson
Nigel Gordon Dickinson
Mitch Dobrowner
Carolyn Drake
Jeremy Dyer
Mark Fernandes
Michelle Frankfurter
Misha Friedman
Lucia Ganieva
Meggan Gould
Gabriela Herman
Sarah Hobbs
Jeroen Hofman
Jennifer Hudson
Yaakov Israel
Heidi Kirkpatrick
Alejandra Laviada
Fritz Liedtke
Sebastian Liste
Gloriann Liu
Larry Louie
Mark Lyon
Michael Marten
Rizwan Mirza
Viviane Moos
Kenneth O Halloran
Susana Raab
Jesse Rieser
Alejandro Rivas
Kent Rogowski
Philipp Scholz Rittermann
Geoffrey H. Short
Youngsuk Suh
Daro Sulakauri
Stephen Vaughan
Toshiya Watanabe
David Welch
Sarah Wilson
Susan Worsham

Be sure to check out the Critical Mass website. Lots of interesting portfolios to browse thru.