The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is presenting work by artists Deborah Bright and David H. Wells from November 19 to December 9, 2009. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, November 19, from 5 – 7 p.m. The public is invited.

Photographer and author, Deborah Bright has long been interested in “landscapes that tell stories, particularly stories that disrupt the smooth surfaces of the official culture.” This body of work draws attention to a new and industrial Israel juxtaposed against the pre-1948 Palestinian occupied land, which remains in ruins. She sees these “Arab” landscapes in Israel as “a disruptive presence, “facts on the ground” that most would prefer to ignore or have removed.” Bright’s series of photographs show “a contested land and its current occupiers do not rest easily upon it. These are spaces of trauma…”

Deborah Bright is currently the Dean of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design. A member of RISD’s Dept. of Photography faculty since 1989, she has shown her work internationally, with a recent solo exhibition, “Deborah Bright: Being and Riding,” traveling to Tel Aviv, Boston, and Las Vegas. She is a published author and extensive lecturer, and her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum in NY and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Bright received her Bachelor’s of Arts from Wheaton College in Illinois and an MFA from the University of Chicago.

David H. Wells will be showing photographs from his ongoing project “Concurrence: India marching backwards into the future.” In this body of work, Wells explores the changing physical and cultural landscape of India – “a fluctuating encounter between the eternal and the modern.” Wells states that his work “visualizes the way I experience India, simultaneously poetic and thought provoking. I try to create for the viewer that same duality of experiences.” Some images are singular and meditative; others are in the form of diptychs or triptychs, and the viewer is asked to look at several images concurrently, “collectively recreating South Asia’s omnipresent visual noise.”
A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Wells received a Fulbright Regional Studies Research Fellowship, which he completed in Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka in 2005. He has spent his last thirteen years in India and the United States. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, as well as the Aaron Siskind Fellowship through the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the US and is included in numerous collections. A graduate of Pitzer College of Claremont Colleges, Wells has worked as a freelance photographer in the Americas, Europe, the Mid-East and Asia.

Deborah Bright, Yehudiyya Gate

David H. Wells, Untitled - South Asia 01

To learn more about each artist, please click on their names above.