THE CANVAS-March 2011

by Britta Konau

Amy Wilton, Karen Lewis, Jocelyn Lee

 While the Canvas has been focused mainly on painters, this issue marks the expansion of the concept of a canvas as a support for artwork in a variety of media—in this case, photography. One of photography’s most notable qualities is its apparent ability to arrest time and create instant memories, which becomes especially obvious when photographing children. Amy Wilton, Karen Lewis, and Jocelyn Lee have explored this subject extensively and have created sensitive studies of the ever-changing human condition. The images presented here portray children living in their own worlds, trying out adult roles, and embodying the awkwardness of adolescence.

Amy Wilton

For Amy Wilton, “photography is who I am.” Her strong sense of identification with the medium is most apparent in the images she has been taking of her two children, Emma and Nigel. Now ten and eight years old, they are accustomed to their mother suddenly asking them to hold a pose so that she can get her camera, or they will even recognize a moment as worthy of being captured. In her commercial and personal photography, Wilton pays special attention to the quality of light. In this particular body of work, she is capturing light in the form of energy—her children’s energy as they grow and evolve.

A house initially constitutes a child’s known universe. It is where most experiences take place and where a future relationship with the larger world is tested and formed. In Wilton’s photos, the house functions as a shelter, a privileged place of security that allows children to explore the world of their imagination. In one shot, her son is totally lost in a reverie that remains inaccessible to us; in another, he is dressed up as Spider-Man. Wilton captures these quiet, dreamy moments of intimacy, letting us share in them.

Nigel stretches lazily in the unfocused background of Birthday Morning on Bed, and it is not apparent what occupies his mind. Emma assembles one of his new toys—an image of quiet absorption of a sort that most adults can no longer sustain. Yet, as the children’s physical world expands, Wilton also captures them at the threshold of inside and out—literally leaving through the front door or interacting with friends outside. And, as the worlds of mother and child keep separating, there will be more and more images of the children away from home and beyond the security it once provided.

Amy Wilton received her MFA from Rockport College (now the Maine Media College), where she also taught. She published her first book, A Passion for Sea Glass, in 2008, and she has self-published a book of personal work called A Child Within. Wilton lives in Hope and runs a successful commercial photography studio. She is represented by VoxPhotographs.

Karen Lewis

Karen Lewis aims to narrow the gap between reality and our collective dreams. With her exquisite sense of color, she stages surreal scenarios of austere yet stunning beauty. These images are born out of the artist’s recurring dreams and from ideas that demand to be addressed—“hopefully making them into a thing of beauty,” she says. Because Lewis recognizes herself in them, she uses young women and children as her models and turns them into strong characters outfitted in decidedly feminine clothing. They are extravagant in their getups and expressions, caught in highly dramatic yet unexplained narratives. Lewis’s imagery exists at the intersection of the worlds of fashion, celebrity, fairy tale, and ordinary life.

Twiggy depicts her daughter Mackenzie when she was eight years old. The young girl’s hair is severely pulled-back, and she is wearing a leopard-print coat and pronounced makeup. She is sitting in an intricate rattan chair, grasping its arms firmly. Named after the ultra-skinny fashion model of the 1960s, it is a re-creation by Lewis of a photograph of her sister taken when she was eight years old. Although Lewis initiated this photo, her daughter willingly went along. “Art can inspire us and remove us from where we are,” Lewis says. And once she has followed the urging of her imagination and created her images, she welcomes interpretations. It is with that freedom in mind, and without knowing the particular circumstances of the photograph’s creation, that one may look at Twiggy as an image of a child trying to fill out a role much larger than her current life. The clothes she wears are those of an adult—too grown-up in style and size—and the chair seems oversized in comparison to her slight body. Her heavily made-up eyes stand in stark contrast to her childish features. Like a shrinking Alice, the world around her has suddenly become too big for her.

Karen Lewis received her BA from Rutgers University and has been in numerous group exhibitions in Maine, including the 2006 Center for Maine Contemporary Art Biennial Juried Exhibition and The Business of Photography at University of New England’s Portland gallery in 2009—the same year that CMCA exhibited her work inspired by the German opera Wozzeck.

Jocelyn Lee

Jocelyn Lee has an almost uncanny ability to capture human vulnerability. She has done so in Children’s Games (1990–1994), a series of photographs that feature children playing, mostly unsupervised, in her Austin neighborhood, and The Youngest Parents (1992–1996), which documents young parents and their children in Texas and Maine and which was later turned into a book. One ongoing series explores emotional connections to the world around us, and another portrays people close to the artist, mainly in the nude. Within the latter series it is particularly the arresting images of adolescents that transfix and touch us.

The poses reveal the physical and emotional awkwardness of the teenager. The subjects do not yet fully inhabit their budding adulthood, and everything seems slightly out of proportion. Aware of Lee’s camera, they are themselves, but they don’t quite know who that is yet. Saidiya Watching TV is part of a group of photographs Lee took of children and adolescents watching television—an attempt to capture their visceral reactions with as little posing as possible. Yet her youthful neighbor seems only partially absorbed as she self-consciously glances toward the camera. A strap has slipped and her slightly overweight body fills out her clothes amply, playfully mirrored by the overstuffed sofa cushions that surround her. Additionally, the expanse of bare wall behind the girl adds extra weight to the lower half of the composition.

For some observers, Lee walks a narrow line, between voyeurism and exploitation on the one hand and empathy on the other. But her work is always empathic and respectful of her subjects. Her compositions make sensitive connections between background and subject, and the attention she spends on beautiful surfaces—whether skin or fabric—give her psychological portraits a quiet dignity.

Jocelyn Lee has exhibited her work nationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Smith College Museum of Art, the Rose Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art. Her work is in the collections of the Yale Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many other institutions. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. She is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York City.