November 2016- Morpho Gallery is displaying the work of two photographers chosen through our Juried Photography show, featured in their own exhibition.

Juror
Born in Germany Barbara Diener is a Chicago-based photographer who received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the California College of the Arts and Masters of Fine Art in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.

Featured Artists:

Vanessa Filley
I remember the day, at age six, when my great-grandmother’s childhood home was torn down. It was an opulent place with ballrooms and gilded halls long abandoned for a smaller more practical house on the same property. Pre-demolition my father lead my older sister and I through the dusty halls and I gapped at the buckling floors and broken windows, imagining what it might have been like to inhabit the space between those walls. There was another house down the road where my father grew up, where I grew up spending summers, weekends and holidays and where until recently my children spent all of their Christmases. Two years ago my grandfather passed away and in his passing, this family home, this gathering place, this place of memory ceased to exist. This loss made me frantic. In my mourning I had a compelling urge to document the place so that I might never forget it, so that my memory might be prompted by the images of a certain room or bench or tree. Now that this home, this place where I belonged, is gone I have a compelling need to document spaces slated for demolition or drastic renovation, spaces where the possible lives that passed between the walls are palpable or inspire a certain sense of possibility. In Ghosts Immemorial I aim to bring a wisp of life to spaces forgotten, abandoned, left for dead, spaces we can no longer afford to live in or maintain, spaces deemed no longer necessary for contemporary life, spaces in need of new life

Stephanie Taiber
These images attempt to isolate the essence of any particular moment. Focused upon the simultaneous occurrence of an external personality and an interior monologue, where a sense of longing is concealed by a need for privacy or separation. Light is ephemeral and signifies the present. In the home, presence is often interrupted by something real and mundane, which eclipses the moment. In rearranging how light interacts with time and place, I am blurring the lines of distinction between different states of being.