OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, June 5th, 6-8pm

ARTIST TALK: Saturday, June 13th, 1pm
A conversation with Ellen Sollod and Elizabeth Brown, independent scholar/writer

‍In La Flaneuse, Le Jardin et Les Fleurs, Ellen Sollod elicits the spirit of place, memory and history, evoking a quintessentially French milieu. In essence, the work is a love letter to Lyon, France told by an ardent admirer.

‍Using contemporary digital photography, antiquated pinhole photography and alternative photographic processes, Sollod creates a dialogue between the physical environment and her personal experience. She encourages the viewer to discover their own relationship to place and the nuances overlaid by history.

The exhibition includes three bodies of work created over 9 years, exploring the city, its historic sites and its quotidian charms.

In La Flanêuse, Sollod places herself in historic sites as an ephemeral figure while asserting a woman’s rightful position in the public realm. Using long exposures, she simultaneously occupies and dematerializes in space, an apt metaphor for our fleeting presence in the context of history. Through the antiquated technology of pinhole photography, Le Jardin captures the romance of the pleasuring ground of Le Parc de la Tête D’Or, a 289-acre public park, opened in 1857, dedicated to human renewal through encounters with nature. Les Fleurs explores the notion of keepsakes made through pressing flowers into a book. In Sollod’s iteration, she deconstructs antiquarian French books and uses these pages as a canvas on which she applies her photographs of flowers.

Altogether, the work celebrates the distinctly seductive character of the French way of life.

Website: www.sollodstudio.com
Instagram: @visualcodex‍

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