Feature Articles


September Issue 1999

New Photography Exhibits to be Featured at The Light Factory

The Light Factory in Charlotte, NC, will open three new exhibits on Oct. 16, which will continue through Dec. 23. The exhibits include: Come Shining: The Spiritual South-Photographs by Deborah Luster, Visions of Faith: Photographs by Wendy Ewald and Children, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

Deborah Luster's visionary, documentary photographs of striking, unmitigated beauty capture the people and places of the rural south, revealing the ties that bind a community in the exhibit, Come Shining: The Spiritual South-Photographs by Deborah Luster. Images of ritualistic life such as Sunday church services and local industries (fishing, boat building and farming) are seen alongside portraits of gifted community members such as poets, writers, magicians and shamans. Recent works in the exhibition focus on the rural areas surrounding Luster's current home in Monroe, LA, as well as in-mates in Louisiana prisons.

Luster's works are included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; New York Public Library; National Archives, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; and Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC.

Luster will give a gallery talk at 6:30pm during the public opening reception on Oct. 15.

In 1997 and 1998, Wendy Ewald, a MacArthur fellow and research associate at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, worked with five groups of children from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and Catholic communities in central NC. Visions of Faith: Photographs by Wendy Ewald and Children documents the children's experience living in minority faith communities during a time of great cultural change. Ewald taught the children how to use cameras to document their religious experiences and express their own feelings and beliefs. The resulting photographs include images of prayer, home ritual and community gatherings.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) experimental artist and pioneer of American "visionary" photography, gained extensive knowledge of lenses and vision as an optician. Concerned with the relationship between reality and fiction, questions of identity, the metaphor of the mask and the presence of death in daily life, this exhibition focuses on unusual portraits of children and other neighbors in Lexington, KY, during the 1950s and 1960s.

For more info check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call 704/333-9755.

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