Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
Arteles Creative Center's residency artists and their projects 2023-2020
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Non thematic program / JULY 2021<br />
Will Connally<br />
USA<br />
www.willconnally.com<br />
About<br />
Will Connally is a photo-based artist whose practice<br />
encompasses fiction writing, set design, performance, and<br />
installation. In addition to drawing inspiration from personal<br />
narratives, his original work is influenced by literary sources,<br />
film noir, and amateur theater productions.<br />
Connally received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook<br />
Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth<br />
University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in<br />
Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship<br />
from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented<br />
his work in exhibitions and artist lectures internationally,<br />
has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art<br />
Museum.<br />
Lake Elster Series<br />
I spent the residency at <strong>Arteles</strong> reading, drawing, painting,<br />
and searching for locations for my photographic series.<br />
I read the folklore of Finland in comparison to Abenaki<br />
Native American legends, delved into ghost stories, and<br />
also researched memory loss. My afternoons were spent<br />
surveying the local environs by foot, bicycle, and car, with<br />
a few general locations already in mind. I was alone for twothirds<br />
of my time there, due to the pandemic, which took<br />
some adjustment. It was an otherworldly experience, having<br />
so much time to myself in a foreign location.<br />
My aim was to find new visual terrain for my photographic<br />
scenes, which are set in the northeastern United States,<br />
specifically in New Hampshire, but have been photographed<br />
across the U.S. and Canada. I scouted the lakes and forests<br />
of Finland to find locations that could resemble my mental<br />
image of Lake Elster, the primary location in the series. The<br />
Nordic woods offered a new sense of scale and otherness<br />
to the series, along with the extended summer evening light,<br />
and I found myself reshooting/ restaging the same scene<br />
in various locations. The photographs embrace the elusive,<br />
ever-changing quality of fiction, especially when retold by a<br />
narrator in his nineties.