Photo Exhibit

Now to September 17, 2005

Organized by Rudy Lemcke and Crystal Mason

Pamela S. Peniston

Pamela S. Peniston began photographing nearly everything up until college. It remained an avocation, taking second place to her training and practice of scenic design and scene painting. Most often, photos were a way to document her work, essentially a tool for her portfolio.

After college, she briefly opened a photography business in Chicago with a friend and shot photographs for theater companies of their cast-both posed and from the production. Still photography remained connected with theater. She closed the business when she moved first to Atlanta and then San Francisco as Artistic Director and a designer for Good Morning, America and The Weather Channel. Once she escaped television, she returned to theater design, working for companies in the Bay Area including ACT, The Willows, Theatre Rhino, Cultural Odyssey, Magic and the Eureka Theater. Pam began integrating photographs and hand-created collaged slides as part of her set design.

“What has always attracted me to design, was its ability to enhance an audience’s view of the story of the play. Story has always been a favorite component of art and I seriously embrace the ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’ school of photography. There is always a narrative lurking about in my photographs, and most often that narrative has been with respect to women and their lives. ”

As she was taking photographs in Rome, a woman appeared at a window. A cigarette dangled from her hand, her bird sitting in its cage outside sang to her. She was in her own world, not even the bird’s song could interrupt her thoughts. It was a scene that could have been from nearly anytime from the 50’s to today. This spurred two series: Women in Windows, and Everyday Italy. The latter is a series of photographs of Italians (and Irish and Tanzanians and Parisians and Belgians and Londoners) performing the tasks they do every day: going to market, chatting from windows, hanging out laundry; bicycling through town. “To me, these photographs (and for that matter, most photographs) are little slices of stories that you can slip yourself into to share the experience.”

Pamela is a founding member of Queer Cultural Center and serves as its Executive Director.

Lenore Chinn

Lenore Chinn is a San Francisco based artist whose familiar realistic acrylics on canvas have been well documented. Her portraits documenting the historical evolution of San Francisco's Queer community challenge the social conventions that currently constitute the racialized order of things.
In 2001 she began a long hiatus from painting to care for her ailing father and in that time the only art produced came from the tools of her painting - her Olympus digital camera, an Epson scanner and printer. This unplanned break from her primary expressive medium launched a foray into new terrain.

“Digital photography,” she says, “has opened a new door for artistic explorations and expressions. Originally employed as a means for documenting my work as a fine art painter and for sketching out the architecture of large acrylics on canvas, it has grown into an extension of my oeuvre. The portability of my digital camera has enhanced my ability to capture and record, from a painter’s perspective, fleeting moments. But instead of the sharp focus realism characteristic of my works on canvas these images often lean toward a softer focus, photographed under ambient lighting and with little premeditation. Intuition for me is the key to my palette.”

The artist has been a founding member of Lesbians in the Visual Arts and Queer Cultural Center and is affiliated with the Asian American Women Artists Association.
http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Chinn/ChinIndex.html

Preview exhibit at www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/LenorePam/gallery.html

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