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FRACTURED VISIONS prilla smith brackett \ amy ragus

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curated bymichele cohen

essays bymichele cohenjessica roscio

spring 2015danforth art, framingham, ma

fall 2015catamount arts, st. johnsbury, vt

FRACTURED VISIONS prilla smith brackett \ amy ragus

front coverBrackett, Family Patterns #13, detail, 2011

Ragus, Yosemite Falls, detail, 2003/2014

aboveBrackett, Family Patterns #13, detail, 2011

Ragus, Yosemite Falls, detail, 2003/2014

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left Brackett, Places of the Heart #18, detail, 2009

fractured visions

Fractured Visions pairs Prilla Smith Brackett’s paintings, drawings, and mixed media works with the photo collages of Amy Ragus, challenging John Berger’s still provocative assertion that a photographer’s “way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject,” while a “painter’s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper.”1 Whether using a paintbrush or camera, working from photographs or with photographs, both Brackett and Ragus apply a collage aesthetic to mix and remix nature with artifice to (re)present their reality. Brackett is a painter with a photographic eye and Ragus is a photographer with a painterly touch.

At first glance, in subject and style, their work is disarmingly similar. Forests, whether New England woods or equatorial jungles, predominate, but the resultant images are not typical landscapes. Rupture—splicing, cutting, and pasting—yields photo collages and mixed media works that are illusionistically convincing, yet unreal. Large-scale formats intensify the impact of the images. Brackett’s Family Patterns 13 (2013), a monumental mixed media work executed on 6 panels, presents a mural sized view of the woods, partially drained of color and accented with a pale blue dresser and mauve four poster bed. The bed extends to the bottom edge, inviting and repelling us at the same time, as we realize the soft mattress has given way to the lumps and crevices of decomposing logs and rocks strewn across the forest floor. Turned wood bed posts mimic angled tree trunks, suggesting nature’s life cycles and the inevitable decay of man-made objects. In this work and others from her series Places of the Heart, Brackett celebrates landscapes familiar to her, but she shrouds these forest scenes behind veils of memory, angling ghost-like transparent silhouettes of beloved family furniture among fallen logs and woodland paths. These works convey absence and longing, conjured through Brackett’s use of layering, dislocation, and association; the images resonate for viewers, who respond with memories of their own.2

Ragus’s Lucid, Walden Woods (2011), also generates discomfort in the viewer. The light and delicate greens of a spring afternoon contrast with ominous compositional elements. A large tree trunk totters in the foreground, hewn through yet still standing. Long shadows float across the bottom half of the photo collage, where presumably the viewer is positioned. The sky reveals Ragus’s working method, pieced together from numerous rectangles of blue and white, their corners still visible. Placed at angles, they converge toward the center, breaking the continuous plane. While Brackett hints at human presence, Ragus fashions a surreal landscape that dares the viewer to enter. Despite their very different starting points and techniques, Brackett and Ragus share a sensibility that blurs distinctions between painting and photography.

Over the course of her career, Brackett has favored juxtapositions and pairings. She began using multiple viewpoints in bold triptychs, a precursor to object displacements in later work. In Selva Oculta #7 (1990), a record of Brackett’s visit to a Costa Rican research station in 1990, the rich darks, delicate lines, and dramatic light and shadows reveal knarled roots, twisted tendrils, and giant leaves. Brackett magnifies the exoticism of the rainforest by presenting it in shades of black and white, building her composite image from photographs of different jungle elements.3 In Rift (1992) and Heartwood (1992), Brackett began by making small drawings created on site. The rectangular format of the “cut and pasted” images came from

michele cohen ph.d. guest curator

Michele Cohen is a curator for the Federal government. She held prior positions as the Founding Director of Public Art for Public Schools in New York City, Assistant Professor and Director of the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College, Boston, and the Director of the Public Arts Trust and Kramer Gallery in Silver Spring, Maryland. Among her publications are articles and books on women artists and public art, including the first history of New York City public school art and architecture, Public Art for Public Schools (The Monacelli Press, 2009). Most recently she served as a contributing writer and consulting scholar on the traveling exhibition and catalogue, Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Cohen received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

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her use of a small cardboard view finder, approximating the framing device of a camera lens. Once drawn, Brackett used photo copies and tracing paper to enlarge and transform images, a primitive form of Photoshop before computer graphics.4 The end result is a complex image that combines animated roots and branches with crisp geometric shapes. Gradually, she shifted her focus to New England forests closer to home in works such as Remnants: Old Growth in the White Mountains #2 (1995), where Brackett used “fractured images as metaphors for our abuse of the environment and for our lives so removed from the natural world.”5 In these works, fracturing is like a discordant chord, jarring viewers to awareness and well suited to Brackett’s message of environmental activism.

Like Brackett, Ragus also assembles a whole from parts, but her art is composed of many more fragments. She creates photographic collages based on hundreds of individual images of a given scene, each a brushstroke. With the advent of digital technology, which she began using extensively in 2007, Ragus can now seamlessly merge disparate views so branches appear to grow out of the sky and the foreground spills over into faceted planes. Digital manipulation becomes a tool not to conceal blemishes but to scramble vistas of woods, waterfalls, and mountains, instilling uncertainty in the viewer. Ragus creates composites made from individual photographs to intensify her experience of a place, transforming a walk through the woods into a panorama that captures and compresses a 360 degree view into a single image, like the retinal memory of spinning in place.

Ragus, like Brackett, also gravitates towards landscapes that have a personal meaning for her. Walden Pond, inextricably linked to Thoreau, has been a life-long source of inspiration. Like Thoreau, Ragus connects her experience of nature to different emotional states, tapping into her remembered response to a place to create her kaleidoscopic views. “Thoreau perceived that our emotional life is reflected in nature,” Ragus explains. “There is reciprocity between our thoughts and feelings and the sight of a dead tree or budding branch.”6 Ragus’s technique of piecing together multiple views of a subject, merging them to suggest movement, accentuates the bareness of treeless branches in the winter or the delicate hues of spring’s awakening. In Love with You (Walden Pond) (2012) features dappled light over a rolling woodland floor, coupled with a view upward through the lacy leaves of a tree canopy. Ragus simultaneously presents our experience of earth and sky, undermining the notion of photographic objectivity from a single viewpoint, throwing us off balance. Ragus’s images built from photographic fragments become strange mirrors of altered scenes. They compress a physical exploration that could only unfold over time into a single visual moment.

Ragus has applied her photo collage technique to other subjects with equal success. Her car series captures the excitement of travel by juxtaposing views of a fleeting landscape through jagged pieces of automobile windshields, dissolving barriers between interior and exterior. In Windmill, Auvillar, France (2012), Ragus distills angles to frame the windmill in the distance between windshield fragments in the foreground. Brackett, too, dissolves divisions between interior and exterior, most pronounced in her recent Refuge series. Based on her exploration of ancient Turkish fortified dwellings and religious sites, she overlays mysterious cave spaces with architectural fragments and patterns. The images operate on two levels, and for Brackett suggest a duality of mind and body.7

right Ragus, In love with you

(Walden Pond), 2012

next page Ragus, Windmill,

Auvillar, France, 2012

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Although digital photography and computer programs like Photoshop have provided liberating image manipulation shortcuts for both artists (particularly for Ragus), Brackett and Ragus have remained relatively consistent in how they have approached the creative process over decades of art making. The surreal juxtaposition of elements in Ragus’s work, seen for example in Max, Gros Morne, Newfoundland (2006), recalls the eerie cityscapes of de Chirico, an early influence on Ragus. Similarly, Brackett enjoys exploring what she has called “a narrative of uncertainty,”8 dislocating the viewer through the association of disparate elements. Ragus collapses time, splicing images to simulate physical movement—in effect extending the moment. Brackett records lived experience through the fractured lens of memory. For both artists, fracturing and layering allows for a richer narrative and the suggestion of simultaneity, paralleling our interaction with the virtual world. Their work speaks to Thoreau’s belief that, “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look….”9

michele cohen, ph.d. guest curator

1 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin Books, 1972), 10.

2 “Complex Conversations: A Place Apart,” an exhibition curated by Craig Bloodgood at the The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts from February 6 to April 10, 2005 explored Brackett’s and her son’s memories of their family Duxbury home.

3 In an email to the author, Brackett wrote, “Yes I’m pretty sure this came from looking at 3 different photos, wanting to show three different views of a jungle growth. It’s not all a tree. I think the middle image is from one of those plants with huge leaves…. And I was very taken with the roots I saw in the jungles. These images come from La Selva research station in Costa Rica, where I went for 2 weeks to draw and photograph in spring 1990. Selva means jungle, and oculta means hidden, secret.” Brackett to Cohen, December 27,2014.

4 Brackett, “Photographic Influences on my Work,” http://prillasmithbrackett.com/Photoinfluencesonwork.pdf.

5 Brackett, “Statement 1999,” in Remnants: Ancient Forests and City Trees Prilla Smith Brackett (Massachusetts: Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College and Watson Gallery, Wheaton College, 1999), n.p.

6 Chris Bergeron,“Wandering in the woods with photographer Amy Ragus,” Posted July 9, 2012 @ 12:01 am; Updated July 9, 2012 at 9:14 AM - See more at: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/x345286559/Wandering-in-the-woods-with-photographer-Amy-Ragus#sthash.OcJ0JeMG.dpuf, accessed January 10, 2015.

7 In an email to the author, Brackett elucidated, “One thing I’m thinking about the Refuge work is that the cave spaces reference the body and perhaps the unconscious, while the architectural fragments with the pattern refer to the mind and the spiritual.” Brackett to Cohen, December 27, 2014.

8 Prilla Smith Brackett, “Artist Statement,” in exhibition catalogue, Place (Boston: NK Gallery, 2011), 7.

9 Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Richard Lenat: 1999-2009), The Thoreau Reader, http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden02.html, Chapter 2.15.

right Ragus, Max, Gros Morne,

Newfoundland, 2006

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landscape reimagined

Beds, bureaus, and chairs float among overgrown trees and roots, foreign objects that both integrate and complicate the overall narrative. Slivers of a car dashboard appear in the midst of a snowy landscape, or burst into an endless highway. The landscape in these works is dense and disorienting, yet visually appealing and hardly impenetrable. These are visions that compel the viewer, and ask us to reimagine how we view the landscape. In questioning how we experience vision, Prilla Smith Brackett and Amy Ragus lead us through their process, weaving a narrative that speaks to contemporary digital machinations, as well as personal experience and memory—which converge across media in their paintings, prints, and photographs.

Fractured Visions triggers complex questions about vision and the photographic process, recalling debates over the role of photography in clarifying, enhancing, and distorting vision. From the earliest days of photography there was a demand for “views,” a photographic landscape that could confirm what one could see (or not) with their own eyes. While the clarity of even the earliest daguerreotypes was astounding, there were obvious limitations to using the first photographic images to capture landscape views—length of exposure time and the size and fragility of the image among them. A daguerreotype of a landscape was simply unable to convey the narrative that an interested public demanded.

In the mid-nineteenth century, traveling exhibitions of paintings, often of the Western landscape and environs, were hugely popular—visual entertainment often accompanied by lectures which captivated an audience eager for depictions of the frontier. Even more popular was the painted panorama, a multi-scene, highly-detailed painting that was unrolled and displayed in dramatic productions. Panoramas often depicted landscapes unfamiliar to most of the viewing public. It was noted that panoramas of Western scenes, particularly those detailing the landscape of California, could take up to three hours to view in their entirety.1 Panoramas were exhibited in large interior spaces, creating an intriguing merger of interior and exterior space—for one had the illusion of being inside the view. In an interesting meeting of painting and photography, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, while conducting photographic experiments that would lead to the introduction of the daguerreotype, became known for the creation of dioramas. These were stationary paintings similar to panoramas, but not curved, and lit to give the illusion of movement and the passage of time; Daguerre was particularly skilled at creating visual illusions and expanding one’s view of a landscape.

As a contemporary viewer, we have the same desire for a full view of the landscape, and to see beyond what is capable with the human eye. This need impelled Amy Ragus to create her first photographic collages, to see beyond the picture plane and fully articulate the experience she felt within a particular landscape, a transit she refers to as “moving through reality.”2 Before Ragus started creating photographic collages, her interest was in large architectural drawings. She would gather multiple images of a view, with a goal to articulate large interior spaces and panoramic vistas. Her need to encompass expanded spaces made her “acutely aware of the spatial limitations of an individual photo frame,” and the need to create a fuller reality that extended the view.3 Her pieced collages did just that, presenting a view that extended above and below a traditional perspective. Her work has shifted from hand-pieced

jessica roscio ph.d. associate curator, danforth art

Since joining Danforth Art in 2011, Jessica Roscio has served as co-curator of an ongoing exhibition from the permanent collection focusing on Boston Expressionism, The Expressive Voice. She has also curated exhibitions of contemporary photography, and the retrospective exhibition Barbara Swan: Reflected Self. Prior to joining Danforth Art, she held positions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Roscio has an M.A. in Art History and a Ph.D. in American Studies, with a focus on the History of Photography.

right Brackett, Refuge #32, detail, 2014

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above Ragus, Into the Light, 2013

photographic collages to works produced through digital manipulation, the process she uses now. Some works, such as Imu (Earth Oven) (1998/2014), were photographed at an earlier date and scanned and digitally collaged later.

Creating a fuller view by merging hundreds of images into one is a laborious process, whether it is done by hand or digitally, not unlike early photographic processes, which required time, patience, and copious amounts of equipment. The collaged images also emphasize the physicality of the photograph as an object, which can be molded and manipulated by hand. The end result plays visual tricks, expanding perspective to fool the eye into questioning the limits of the view. Although in more recent works the “seams” in the composition are less visible, Ragus still invites the viewer to experience her fractured view, and “slip and tumble through the cracks like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.”4

For Prilla Smith Brackett, providing a fuller view is part of her conceptual approach to the landscape. Her works reflect numerous and layered experiences with a single place—using photographs, drawings, prints, and painting—from her earlier Remnants series through her more recent Reverie and Refuge works. Brackett’s largest work in the exhibition, the six-paneled narrative Family Patterns #13 (2011), merges the domestic with a forest setting, integrating personal history and memory into the landscape to create a multi-layered narrative.

Ragus’s series of works integrating her car and the landscape addresses questions regarding ways of seeing. The seams are obvious in these pieces; it is clear that photographs have been pieced together to create the view. Without needing to show every detail, they create the feeling of being in the space while simultaneously experiencing all that is around, above, and below. In Arriving at Home (2013), fragments of a car—dashboard, rearview mirror, steering wheel—merge with a tree-lined landscape and a narrow road stretching into the distance—a perfect illustration of vanishing perspective. The sky above the trees functions as the roof of the car, and one feels as if they are sitting next to the artist, experiencing interior and exterior space at the same time. In Into the Light (2013) only a hand on a fragment of the steering wheel and the expanse of the windshield and surrounding car windows shatter the road stretching in front, behind, and on both sides of the image. Lines on the road and a slight blur of the trees produce the sensation that the car is in motion, creating the same illusion of movement nineteenth-century panoramas were meant to evoke. One does not just feel as if they are standing on the edge of the view and looking in, in these works we are a part of the car’s interior, sitting in the seat, with only the windshield separating us from the landscape that surrounds. Ragus’s terrific turn of phrase “moving through reality” is apt here, as one feels the two-dimensional work in three dimensions.

Prilla Smith Brackett also evokes a conversation between interior and exterior space in her work. In line with the history of using vision to build a narrative, Brackett’s work speaks to the role of place, and how objects function as tangible elements of memory. Brackett approaches the landscape in a conceptual manner, asking that we look beyond its visual elements. Particularly striking are the ways in which she uses objects of domesticity, primarily chairs and beds, and how they transition from solid to increasingly ethereal forms across works. A number of series represented in this exhibition, Reverie, Family Patterns, and Places of the Heart, reference this relationship

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to domesticity and a home that had been in the family for almost a century; this site is deeply ingrained in the artist’s work. She notes that “over time the furniture has become less substantial and less grounded,” perhaps referencing the loss of the home. In three works from the Places of the Heart series (#6, #18, and #19) the bureaus, chairs, and beds are almost transparent, peering out of an overgrown forest which dominates the composition. In Reverie #15, roles are reversed. A heavily outlined bed catapults across the picture plane while a red chair floats beneath it. Rows of domestic furnishings march in lines in the background while foliage appears faintly behind. In this work the natural world is only truly evident in the broad expanse of the bedspread—a visual juxtaposition that merges nature with the man-made.

In earlier work, as well as her newest series, Refuge, Brackett states that her images are “informed by layering, transparency, [and] the evocation of memory.”5 Her interpretations of the landscape delve deeply, evident in the use of multiple media, including monoprints that have greatly influenced her painting. Additionally, photography has lent itself well to the methods Brackett engages in her work— she initially sketched works from photographs, using photographic images as the beginning of her process. This led to drawing, layering, fragmenting, and finally painting. Photoshop has now made the cropping and layering easier, but visual juxtapositions are still integral to the work. Like Ragus, Brackett originally manipulated her photographs by hand, recognizing the photograph as an object. Acknowledging the materiality of the process has produced multi-layered works that successfully “encourage thoughts of memory, refuge, and imagined narratives.”6 Overall, Brackett’s technique leads to an appealing “narrative uncertainty” in her works, which speaks to the lasting reaction that Ragus also seeks in viewers.

Both Brackett and Ragus have challenged us in their use of photography in their work. They have used it as a visual aide, and recognize it as a fine art—adapting to this dual role acknowledges some of photography’s earliest debates and assures its lasting place as a mercurial medium. The relative ease of technology continues to extend photography’s visual possibilities, and its relationship to the landscape has been forever reimagined.

jessica roscio, ph.d. associate curator, danforth art

1 Martha A. Sandweiss, ed. Photography in Nineteenth Century America. Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991, 102-103. See Sandweiss’s essay within, “Undecisive Moments: The Narrative Tradition in Western Photography.” 

2 Amy Ragus, “Technique,” http://www.amyragus.com/moving-through-reality.

3 Ibid.

4 “Amy Ragus-thoughts on content,” sent to the author, December 12, 2014.

5 Prilla Smith Brackett, “Statement 1: Refuge,” http://prillasmithbrackett.com/info.html.

6 Prilla Smith Brackett, “Photographic Influences on my Work,” http://prillasmithbrackett.com/Photoinfluencesonwork.pdf.

rightBrackett,

Reverie #15, 2012

next page left

Brackett, Reverie #20, 2012

right Brackett,

Night Pieces #11, 2011

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left page Ragus, Lucid, Walden Woods, 2011

this page above Brackett, Family Patterns #12, 2011

below Ragus, Arriving at Home, 2013

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right Brackett, Places of

the Heart #6, detail, 2007

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prilla smith brackett

Prilla Smith Brackett is known for working with landscape conceptually, depicting more than a description of a place. Brackett has exhibited throughout the eastern US including a solo show traveling to 8 venues in New England and the mid-Atlantic States. Other venues include DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MA, National Academy of Sciences, DC, The Art Complex Museum, MA, and Hanoi Contemporary Art Center, Vietnam. Her work is in the collections of Harvard University Art Museums, New Britain Museum of American Art, Danforth Art Museum, Worcester Art Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her honors include a finalist award in painting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, an award & residency at the Ucross Foundation, an Earthwatch Artist award in Madagascar, and a fellowship in painting at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Born in New Orleans, Brackett has social science degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of California/Berkeley. She earned her MFA in drawing & painting from the University of Nebraska/Lincoln. She added printmaking to her practice in 2003. Brackett lives and works in Boston, MA.

left Brackett, Remnants: Old Growth in the White Mountains #2, 1995, Private Collection

amy ragus

Amy Ragus' work in photocollage has been exhibited in one person and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Trained as a painter at Wellesley College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA), she turned to photography in the 1980's. Ragus considers herself a painter who uses photo fragments as brushstrokes on a larger field. Ragus is a three time MacDowell Fellow and has been artist-in-residence in Gros Morne National Park (Newfoundland), Yosemite National Park (California), Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (Oregon), Hermitage Artist Retreat (Florida), Moulin a Nef/Virginia Center for the Arts (Auvillar, France), and elsewhere. The artist has had one-person exhibitions at The Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA), The French Cultural Center (Boston), Thoreau Farm Trust (Concord, MA), Highfield Hall (Falmouth, MA), The Cummings Arts Center (Connecticut College), Bentley College (Waltham, MA), Babson College (Wellesley, MA), Regis College (Weston, MA), The Deans Gallery at MIT (Cambridge, MA), The Art Complex Museum (Duxbury, MA), and The Tsongas Gallery at Walden Pond (with Thoreau Scholar Tom Blanding). She was a founding partner and Vice President of Fine Arts Express, Inc. (1978-1994) and an Assistant Professor of Art at Regis College (1995-2002). Ragus was born in New York City. Her parents met at the Cooper Union Art School in the East Village. She currently lives in a small farmhouse in the woods of southeast Massachusetts.

right Ragus, Tracks,

Walden Pond, 2012

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right Brackett, Family Patterns #13, detail, 2011

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checklist

Works by Prilla Smith Brackett

Selva Oculta #7, 1990Ink, charcoal, pastel, oil stick, graphite on paper96" x 74"

Rift, 1992Oil on linen40" x 32"

Heartwood, 1992Oil on linen64" x 49"

Remnants: Old Growth in the White Mountains #2, 1995, Private CollectionGraphite, conte, and charcoal on paper22 ½” x 29 ¾”

Remnants: Communion #9, 1997Acrylic wash, graphite, conte, charcoal, pastel, collaged paper on paper29 ¾" x 22 ½"

Remnants: Communion #11, 1997Collaged paper, graphite, charcoal, acrylic, oil on canvas30" x 60"

Places of the Heart #6, 2007Ink, acrylic, oil stick, oil, collaged paper on board19 ¾” x 29 ¾”

Places of the Heart #18, 2009Oil and acrylic on panel40” x 30” Collection Danforth Art Gift of the Artist, 2014.107

Places of the Heart #19, 2009Oil and acrylic on panel30” x 40”

Night Pieces #11, 2011Acrylic and oil on panel12” x 12”Collection Danforth Art Gift of the Artist, 2014.106

Family Patterns #12, 2011Drawing materials, acrylic, oil on panel12” x 12”Collection Danforth Art Gift of the Artist. 2014.105

Family Patterns #13, 2011Drawing materials, acrylic, oil on panel96” x 108” (6 panels, each 48” x 36”)

Reverie #15, 2012Woodcut, polyester litho plate, stencil on BFK 25010 ¾” x 10 ¾”

Reverie #17, 2012Woodcut, polyester litho plate, chine collé, stencil on BFK 25010 ¾” x 10 7/8”

Reverie #20, 2012Woodcut, polyester litho plate, stencil, chine collé on BFK 25011" x 11"Collection Danforth Art Gift of the Artist, 2014.108

Refuge #26, 2014Acryla gouache, acrylic ink on Duralar18” x 24”

Refuge #31, 2014Acryla Gouache on Duralar18" x 24"

Refuge #32, 2014Acryla Gouache on Duralar40" x 53"

Works by Amy Ragus

IMU (earth oven, Hawaii), 1998/2014Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print25 x 46”

Tablelands, Gros Morne, Newfoundland, 2001/2014Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print35 x 52”

Yosemite Falls, 2003/2014 Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print50 x 36”

Max, Gros Morne, Newfoundland, 2006Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print16 x 23”

Spring, Great Meadows, Concord, 2011Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print28 x 27”

Source, Great Meadows, Concord, 2011Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print29 x 24”

Lucid, Walden Woods, 2011Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print35 x 36”

Tracks, Walden Pond, 2012Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print33 x 30”

Pond in November, Walden, 2012Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print32 x 33”

In love with you (Walden Pond), 2012Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print34 x 36”

In the Woods, Fruitlands, 2012Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print34 x 36”

Windmill, Auvillar, France, 2012 Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print19 x 27”

Falls, Vermont, 2012Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print45 x 30”

Path, Merritt Island, Florida, 2013 Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print36 x 34”

At Dudley Pond, Wayland, MA, 2013Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print33 x 32”

Quarry, Rockport, MA, 2013 Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print29 x 34”

Arriving at Home, 2013 Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print19 x 32”

Into the Light, 2013Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print21 x 31”

Freight Train, 2014Digital photo collage/archival inkjet print19 x 37”

Note: Where there are two dates for the images, the first date is date image was shot with film, and the second date is when digitized and collaged.

Unless otherwise noted, all work courtesy of the artists.

above Ragus, Spring, Great Meadows, Concord, 2011

belowBrackett, Reverie #17, 2012

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left Ragus, Quarry,

Rockport, MA, 2013

above Ragus, IMU (earth oven,

Hawaii), 1998/2014

rightRagus, Freight

Train, 2014

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acknowledgments

This exhibition was made possible through the work of a number of individuals, and we are thankful for the contributions of each of them. We are grateful for the scholarly research, generosity of time, and sharp curatorial eye of guest curator Michele Cohen, who was able to see connections between the artists’ work that had not been considered before.

Artists Prilla Smith Brackett and Amy Ragus were integral to each step of the exhibition process, and we thank them for their accessibility and valuable input in the project. Their support, trust, and engagement contributed to the collaborative spirit that made this exhibition possible.

Many thanks to Robin DeBlosi, Marketing and Membership Manager, who was central to each step of the catalog production process and kept things moving in a way that is much appreciated. Graphic designer Nicole Melone produced high-quality work for which we are very grateful.

Photography credits go to Prilla Smith Brackett and Amy Ragus—thank you.

Finally, thanks go to the staff of Danforth Art, who are a supportive and collegial team, and Director Emerita Katherine French, who provided invaluable insight regarding the artists and work in the exhibition.

rightBrackett,

Selva Oculta #7, detail, 1990

next pageBrackett, Places of the Heart #19,

2009

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