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The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to announce its upcoming summer solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist, Myra Greene. 

On view from June 13 – July 26 will be Ms. Greene’s ongoing series, Character Recognition in which the photographer has created a visual index of her face and facial expressions on 3x4” black glass plate Ambrotypes. As throughout her work, with the series Character Recognition Myra Greene directly confronts issues of difference, beauty, melancholy sentiment, and physical and emotional recollections as played out on the surface of the skin, that are far more complex than just skin deep. 

In Character Recognition, Greene utilizes her own facial features as a terrain to explore these ideas. Through a quasi-scientific visual classification system in which she repeatedly examines such areas as her mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and profile as well as her use of a antiquarian photographic process (in which black glass is photo-sensitized with a thin layer of Collodion, and then sensitized in a silver bath after which while still wet, the glass plate is exposed using a large format camera and then developed and fixed) Greene references the ethnographic studies of the late 19th century and the visual history of American Slavery. 

Character Recognition was born out of a swell of bigotry both personal and public (surrounding the rhetoric of Hurricane Katrina) that Greene experienced. These experiences forced her to raise such questions as – What do people see when they look at me? Am I nothing but black? Is that skin tone enough to describe my nature and expectation in life? Do my strong teeth make me a strong worker? Does my character resonate louder than my skin tone? 

By focusing her camera on fragments of her whole face; these contemporary studies link the viewer to a complicated historical past. While the process of wet plate codes the body in this work, the (contemporary) body is able to speak back. Greene is far from a passive subject and through small facial gestures the body reacts to and rejects these modes and ways of classification. 

About the Artist
Many of Myra Greene’s projects include photography, printmaking, sound, as well as digital production work. She melds these processes into exploring issues about the body, memory, and the absorption of culture and the ever shifting identity of African Americans.

Greene’s work has been exhibited widely including recent solo shows at such venues as Harnett Gallery, Rochester, NY; Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, Jersey City, NJ; and Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD as well as group shows at Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Umbrella Arts Gallery, New York, NY; El Taller Boricua Gallery, Bronx, NY; and The Art Institute of Colorado, Denver, CO among many others. 

She has received many awards throughout her career and most recently was awarded the Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowship in 2009. Greene has been an Artist in Residence at Light Work in Syracuse in 2004 and the Center of Photography at Woodstock in 2003. Her work has been featured in the pages of such publications as The International Review of African American Art, Prompt Magazine, Nueva Luz, Exposure, and CPW’s publication PQ. 

Myra received an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2002 and holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MI.  She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. 

To see more of Myra’s work visit www.myragreene.com

Character Recognition will be on view in CPW’s Kodak gallery from June 13 through July 26, 2009. 

The opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 13th from 5-7pm with an artist talk by Myra Greene at 6pm.

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