Talk with artists Alexa Frangos and Marcia Mahoney

Worry Doll  |  Alexa Frangos
"Since becoming a parent, my fears have become lucid dreams about the traumas and enigmas of childhood that end before any climax can define them." ~ Alexa Frangos

In her series Worry Doll, Frangos is looking to refract her parental anxieties in story pieces that look to early cinema, fairy tales, and Dare Wright’s Lonely Doll books. Each piece uses the same doll posed in a sequence of images, like found segments of a fuller, lost story. According to Frangos, "The doll acts as a surrogate for the child in the story, and perhaps also acts as talisman to receive these anxieties, like traditional worry dolls might."

Alexa Frangos is a Chicago-based photographer. She studied Visual Communications and Photography at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her multimedia work focused on representations of women in film. Her current work consists of photographs that reference narrative, domestic life, self-portraiture and early cinema.
 
Infinite Pleasure |  Marcia Mahoney
"The first time I made a picture like this I was 16 years old, standing in the stairwell of my small high school. Decades have passed. I have aged; yet that image remains." ~ Marcia Mahoney

Grounded in the reality of that seminal moment, Mahoney's work now tells stories expanded by nostalgia and life experience. Importantly for her, the making of that picture spawned a lifelong practice of observing people, following light, and scripting narratives suggested by ordinary moments.

The street photographs in Mahoney's collection, Infinite Pleasure, capture the familiarity, beauty and ephemeral pleasure of everyday gesture and light. Irving Penn once described photography as the synthesis of reality and imagination. The images in this series expose that fusion. For both artist and viewer, their reality triggers memory and imagination.

Images from this collection can be seen at Amanda Smith Gallery in Texas, PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont; Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. One of the photographs in this portfolio, Final Act, won Best in Show in the Images of Illinois competition. In addition to being a member of Perspective Group and Photography Gallery, Marcia Mahoney is a member of f8collective and serves as Treasurer of Chicago's Filter Photo.
 
About the Exhibition
The show runs October 4 - 28, 2018. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 6, 5-7 p.m. A conversation with the artists is scheduled for Thursday, October 18, at 7 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Thursday-Saturday, 12-6 p.m. and Sunday, 12-5 p.m. For more information go to www.perspectivegallery.org.