Exhibition Statement

Bees can be violent and unpredictable. A Keeper must live with the understanding that they could get stung, but for them, it is worth it in order to harvest sweet honey. Beekeeper is an authentic depiction of staggered recovery. The work explores an ongoing reestablishment of the artist’s relationship with men; not as individuals but as an ambiguous concept. It considers the confused correlation between this and an understanding of her own feelings of vulnerability as a woman. This work was made in an attempt to reflect upon fear, threat and trust in a manner which is safe and accessible. For the artist, this work consolidated the continuation of life, new experience and growth.

Artist Biography

Sadie Catt is a British photographer and educator currently based in Bristol, England. She has worked with commissioning clients such as The Financial Times, Notion, and Port Magazine. 

Her personal work has been published by The British Journal of Photography, Boooooom, C41 and Splash & Grab Magazine. Most recently Sadie exhibited as part of The National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, She has also exhibited at Side Gallery, The Royal Photographic Society, Photo North and Noorderlicht International Photography Festival. 

In addition to her photographic practice, Sadie curated Miniclick, a series of photographic talks hosted by The Royal Photographic Society in Bristol. Sadie is currently an Associate Lecturer in Photography at Bath Spa University. 

For a Great Cause: The Greenhouse

For every exhibition, we endeavour to raise funding and awareness for an artist-selected charity. Sadie Catt has selected The Greenhouse an organisation which ‘provides free counselling for people affected by sexual abuse in Bristol & Taunton. A safe space to talk and truly make a difference.’ When visiting the gallery in person, via our website, and our social media there is an option to offer a donation for those that can and would like to help us help others.

Caleb Stein

Caleb Stein (b. 1994, UK) is a multimedia artist currently based in the U.S. His work has been exhibited internationally, often as an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena (b. 1994, Colombia). Work is available through Vin Gallery in HCMC, The Curator’s Room in Amsterdam, and Rose Gallery in LA. Orejarena & Stein have been nominated for a number of major photographic awards, including the Hariban/Benrido Award (with Orejarena, chosen by YasufumiNakamori, Senior Curator of Photography at Tate Modern), and the W. Eugene Smith Grant (with Orejarena, jurors include Teju Cole). Independently, Stein has been nominated for major photographic awards, including a recent LensCulture nomination by Legacy Russell (Senior Director, The Kitchen).

A book of Orejarena & Stein’s work ‘Long Time No See’ was just published and will be available to the public through Jiazazhi Press in August of 2022, with texts by Đ Tường Linh and Forensic Architecture, designed in collaboration with Brian Paul Lamotte. Stein is currently working on an artist book of his photographs from ‘Down by the Hudson’, his long-term 'ode’ to Poughkeepsie; text contributions to this ‘Down by the Hudson’ book project include an introduction by Amitava Kumar (Professor of English, Vassar College) and an afterword by Matt Carey-Williams (Senior Director, Victoria Miro Gallery).

Stein’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, i-D Vice, Vogue Italia, It’s Nice That, WePresent, Hamburger Eyes, and Paper Journal Magazine, among many other places. In 2020, a short documentary about ‘Down by the Hudson’ was commissioned by Somewhere Magazine (directed by Andrea Orejarena). Stein’s work is in a number of public & private collections, including the Nguyen Art Foundation (with Orejarena), the Frances Lehman Loeb Museum, and the Ann Tenenbaum & Thomas H. Lee Family Collection (with Orejarena).

Down by the Hudson

Artist Statement

Down by the Hudson is my personal ode to Poughkeepsie, NY, a small town in upstate NY where I lived for five years. I was raised in big cities and didn’t know much about small American towns other than conceptions I had inherited from things like Norman Rockwell illustrations, Grant Wood paintings, and Life Magazine spreads. So, I started to walk along the town's Main Street - every day, I walked for years, learning and responding to its rhythms. These walks became a way of forming my own sense of place. I've realized that a lot of what I do is try to understand my relationship to the U.S., my adopted home.

In 2016, the presidential and local elections were almost neck-and-neck between political parties in Poughkeepsie, to the point where you could have fit the difference into a bar on a Saturday night. The day after the election, the sense of tension and conflict became palpable as I walked down Poughkeepsie's Main Street. I learned that in the 1990s, IBM's local headquarters downsized and left thousands unemployed. In many ways, Poughkeepsie is like countless other small American towns grappling with the effects of post-industrialization.

The town’s watering hole felt like a counterpoint to the rest of the town because so much of its political tension dissipates in this safe haven. It's right by a drive-in movie theater on the outskirts of town, across from the local American Legion outpost. Families have been going there for generations. In this space, Trump supporters swam next to people of many different backgrounds. The sense of conflict that is usually so pronounced in this country relaxes in this space. The watering hole feels like a modern-day Eden to me.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit advocates for the experience of living with uncertainty. The pursuit of not knowing, of no clear destination, she proposes, opens up possibilities and a space in which we might see ourselves and the world anew.

The past several years have felt like a seismic upheaval where personal, social, political and racial topographies have shifted and been displaced. The choice to embark upon an MFA amidst all of this has been doubly confounding, a conscious decision to step into the unknown, into undiscovered territory, an attempt to find personal forms of expression.

The restriction of remaining in place, at home, in our local communities, which at first seemed like an obstruction, became an invitation to turn our gaze towards things that might not otherwise have come into view. To have the medium and tradition of photography as a companion allowed us to be in the world and make meaning in an essential and sustaining way.

Art making takes time. If nothing else, undertaking an MFA program has been a way to steal this time from the world, to give to ourselves and our deepest inklings and concerns, a space to play with ideas that at first view seemed cumbersome and unformed. To pose questions that might be unwelcome or misconstrued in other places.

Holding space for each other, a space of critique and care, has allowed for experiments, false starts, and attempts to articulate our deeper intentions. A space to offer each other insights, possibilities for the work, and humor when things seemed dire. In a frenetic world of culture wars and nagging algorithms vying for our attention, a space for listening and contemplation has been radical and foundational. To learn how to build and sustain a personal practice, a way of being in relation to the world, a stronger belief in our abilities to make images—to express ideas that words cannot yet convey—is a significant resource.

Without these diversions from the path, we might not have emerged differently than when we set out.

Text by Drew Waters

Photographers: Renee Harbers, Michael Mahne Lamb, Young Kim, Gabriel McCurdy, Jeffrey Robins, Emily Sheffer, Mico Toledo, Russ Thompson, Drew Waters and Forest Woodward.

Notes From a Detour

This Thursday, June 2, Rubén Vega opens "Interiors" a small exhibition in Aravaca, Madrid (8:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m.). It will run until July 24. On Friday June 3rd I will also be there from 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. If you feel like going to see it any other day, I recommend you call beforehand. 

Given the thousands of places around the world that Gerry Johansson has observed over the years, from Kvidinge to Ulan Bator, it is perhaps not entirely without interest that he has a permanent address in Höganäs, 46.7 km from Landskrona Foto. In any case, it is in the darkroom of his basement that the photographs attain their perfection – and have earned him epithets such as “classical black and white photography personified”.

He lived in Varberg when he became Swedish school champion in colour photography in 1961. But those days are over. “Photography in black and white is like listening to the radio. Colour is like watching television.”

Gerry Johansson is a visual artist who has an ability to express himself in words as well. But other people too have formulated memorable quotations about their impressions of his pictures:

“It always seems as if someone has recently been in Gerry Johansson’s pictures, but has just left. No one has touched anything, or done anything, no one has messed things up, made a muddle, caused a disturbance, or moved anything. Just someone who was there for a little while, walked into the moment, walked out of the picture.”

Or: “I can’t detect in a single one of Gerry Johansson’s pictures anything, however small, that shows off or pretends to be something else. You wish you could be such a person. Someone who no longer pretends or makes things up. You wish you were a Gerry Johansson picture.”

A number of visitors to this exhibition will also probably walk away wishing they were a Gerry Johansson picture. Or maybe a Gerry Johansson book. There are a number here to choose from, 42 to be exact, photo books as austere as they are self-willed, arranged in showcases. Virtually all the photographs depict a place, hardly a single one showing a human being.

Filmproduction: Nils Bergendal

Music: Hans Appelqvist

Translation – Pelle Holmgren