EXHIBITION
AUGUST 5 – SEPTEMBER 23
OPENING RECEPTION
SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 / 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Glimmers of the Hidden & Seen
To foster collaboration, mentorship, and diversity, The Light Factory has initiated a program to pair emerging and established photographers from different backgrounds for two-person exhibitions. The Emerging x Established Series connects new audiences and allows photographers to connect, learn, and expand their perspectives. For this program’s newest installment, Ashley Kauschinger and Dionna Bright bring their works of art to life in the upcoming exhibition, Glimmers of the Hidden and Seen. In this exhibition, both artists examine tensions between the personal and cultural and the internal and external. Through self-portraits and still lives, the artists create poetic imaginings of the hidden and the seen worlds of being a woman.
Images By: MAC330
DIONNA BRIGHT [ARTIST STATEMENT]
The act of taking self-portraits allows me to be fully present and authentic. In this space, I tell my story in addition to the narratives of my ancestors by emoting the fullness of our black experiences.
Photography is the medium by which I portray the multifacetedness of blackness and capture our history, existence, and potential.
I value connection to the moment; through composition, manipulation of light, attention to detail, props, expressive tones, and intentional color grading, I seek to captivate the viewer to perceive black temporality from a unique perspective.
My work seeks to empower the black individual and collective to introspect, heal, engage, and explore newness unapologetically.
ASHLEY KAUSCHINGER [ARTIST STATEMENT]
Ashley Kauschinger’s series Cycles (2017 – ) investigates women’s history and considers the structural underpinnings women have lived in across time and culture and how they cycle and rhyme. Inspired by archeological non-fiction, gender studies, poetry, art history, and personal experience, Cycles weaves a fragmented and non-linear exploration of what being a woman means historically and personally. Although limited by an individual lens, the series is not intended to limit what defines womanhood and welcomes ambiguous and broad interpretations of woman-identified and non-binary relations to the work. The complicated layers of the construction of gender mimic the overtly constructed nature of the images and the diverse approaches such as projection, performance, installation, fibers, still life, and landscape. Both constructed and natural, personal and cultural, private and public, internalized and external.
The series surveys various topics and themes, including the body (ideas of land, water, ritual, fertility, and worship), cultural barriers and violence, interpretations of female-identified poets, and historical figures and events. The most specific personal experiences inspiring the work include disordered eating, fertility issues, and cultural pressures.
What does being a woman mean? After years of exploration, I still find no clear answer… except maybe everything just is, and isn’t, consistent in its contradictions.
Dionna Bright is a self-taught creative director, model and portrait photographer in Charlotte, North Carolina. She utilizes her love for nature, sunlight and energy to visualize her experiences, vulnerability and expressions of the multifacetedness of her blackness through the use of her Nikon camera. Her work explores themes of inner childhood, identity, spirituality, authenticity and expressionism.
In 2023 Dionna held her first solo exhibition, SIGNS and her work has been featured in publications, magazines, books and highlighted on WBTV.
Ashley Kauschinger is a light-based artist. Her work is interested in the intersections of art, poetry, history, identity, and material. She received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA from Texas Woman’s University. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and is in the collections of Vanderbilt University and the Sir Elton John Collection. Ashley is also a curator, editor, and community member. She has collaborated on projects with organizations such as Lenscratch, The Light Factory, MINT, Society for Photographic Education, and more. She also founded the online photography magazine Light Leaked that ran from 2012-2019. Ashley previously taught photography at the University of South Carolina and Maine Media Workshops + College. She is currently the Director of Public Engagement and Digital Experience at Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
Glimmers of the Hidden & Seen is supported by the Infusion Fund and its generous donors.
