5th Biennial of Fine Art & Documentary Photography
Oct 4 - 21, 2018
Nau Bostik
Barcelona, Spain
This year I was awarded in six categories of the 11th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers and as such, invited to exhibited selected work at the 5th Biennial of Fine Art & Documentary Photography in Barcelona, Spain.
https://barcelonafotobiennale.com/
Not wanting to miss such an honorable experience, I traveled all the way to Barcelona from the United States with one of my dogs, Luna, to attend the Barcelona Foto Biennale in person. Luna and I arrived in Barca on October 2nd without nearly enough time to adjust to a new country before the Biennale opened on the evening of the fourth. The night we arrived at our affordable (tiny) attic room without a window we promptly went to bed and slept for twelve hours. It took us three hours in our jointly-jetlagged state to find our way from our room to the Nau Bostik, where the opening ceremonies began before we arrived. This was our first time in Spain, and my first time flying overseas with a dog, and it was Luna’s first time flying anywhere at all. It never crossed my mind that my dog would be just as jetlagged as me. I was so overwhelmed and disoriented upon our arrival at the Biennale that I scarcely talked to anybody the entire evening… but I did manage to take some photos with my cell phone and went home with inspiration to take flight by in my dreams. I will be returning to the Nau Bostik for the last week of the show, after which I will collect my work to eventually take home.
The Nau Bostik http://naubostik.com/ is a new cultural center developed under the direction of Catalonian architect Xavier Besana; an installation in an empty factory that had been out of commission for ten years. The Nau Bostik comprises eleven halls and totals 18,000 square feet. This is the first time that the Biennale has been held in such a non-traditional space and the result gives an edgy, industrial, and raw feeling that seems poignant for our time. The photos were printed with a matte finish, dry mounted and scaled to a fairly homogeneous size. The halls of the Nau Bostik gave me the sensation of entering a giant three-dimensional magazine… a mega-zine…. the large matte images popping out at me from white washed walls etched in the language of structural decay.
(Ten of my photos were displayed in this hall…. you can see them on the back wall, lower left row.)
Special guest exhibitor at the Biennale was fine art and commercial photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten: http://juliafullerton-batten.com/ Her photography is intense, colorful, and iconic - I will share more images of her work in my next post.
(Photo by Julia Fullerton-Batten)
(Photo by Julia Fullerton-Batten)
(Gallery by Julia Fullerton-Batten)
I spent three hours wandering the halls and platforms of the Nau Bostik, absorbing the magnitude of breathtaking images from artists all over the world. To see some of my work on the walls alongside them left me with something I struggle to describe except to say that artists serve their hearts on platters to all humanity, and to be recognized for it confirms that there is indeed humanity out there, receiving.
The following are photos of my work as exhibited at the 5th Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography. I was awarded in the categories of Documentary, Self-Portrait, Nude Figure, Open Theme, Nature, and People.
{Stay Tuned for my next post in which I will share some of my favorite images from other artists!}
(Lucy at the Northern State Hospital)
(Lucy at the Northern State Hospital)
(Lucy at the Northern State Hospital)
(Portrait of a Pig).
(Top: A Soulmate Has a Heart You Knew
Bottom: The Language of Peace )
(Americana)
(Media Ban is Propaganda by Proxy)
(Self-Portrait of Me by My Shadow)
(Luna took a cat nap in front of my portraits of Lucy, whom we miss very much right now).