The lovely and talented Jen Chappell is currently the featured exhibitor at the Workhouse Photographic Society! We will host an artist’s reception in our studio in building W6, Saturday, August 1st, 7:00 – 9:00p. Meet Jen and many of the photographers, as we welcome the prints on the walls! Directions, here.
This exhibition entitled, Volume by Jen Chappell, is so thoughtful and succinct. The work is based on the notion of the sound that an image resonates. The photographs have been selected from over two decades of her photographic career, and represent the span of her vision.
On the featured artist and exhibition, by the artist:
“Volume is a play on many levels,” Chappell says. “Each image has a sound quality and each resonates in its own way. Some are quiet (volume 3); some are quite loud (volume 10). I am showing a volume of work, cataloging my evolution and growth as an artist.”
Chappell began photographing directly after high school. Her first works were portraits of friends and the cataloguing of her surroundings. As her surroundings morphed, so did Chappell’s photography. Quickly she became the de facto chronicler of the Lehigh Valley and New Jersey punk scene. She shot many album covers and band photographs.
The frenetic pace that was this demimonde punk scene slowly grew into more structural and architectural work that imbued inanimate objects and spaces with an otherworldliness through her deft use of graininess and cross processing of color. The moodiness that she had found in the interplay of texture and color then encouraged her to move her eye to concentrated close-ups of living and growing things.
Chappell sees these as just another aspect of herself. “I chronicle my life by photographing those things that speak to me. Often these items are either of two opposites. A flower or rusted sheet metal; the quiet morning fog or a concert. I see the beauty of the normal, be it conventionally, or absurdly, beautiful …the life force.”
Jen Chappell is a juried member of the Workhouse Photographic Society at Lorton, a member of Del Ray Artisans, the Del Ray Dozen, and a consistently juried contributor to Alexandria City’s Art in City Hall program. Her work has hung in National Symphony Orchestra designer show houses as well as the Pennsylvania State House.
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