Ogden: The show is called "A Pinelands Portrait: Art of the Pine Barrens."
I called it that because I was thinking of a kind of specific portrait, not just the Pine Barrens, per se, not just the National Reserve.
It's my portrait, in a sense, of this very specific place, this reserve, but also the surrounding territory.
We have Heather Palecek, who does really interesting processes.
They're not standard digital photographs, straightforward, the work of an instant.
Palecek: These processes force me to slow down.
They force me to be mindful while making my work.
Ogden: One of her photographic series is called "Squash!"
and they're tiny photographs.
We have two in the show.
She's photographed the spotted lantern fly, another invasive species, you know, all over new Jersey now.
Stomp on them when you see them.
Palecek: So, I was painting the bottoms of shoes with photochemistry, placing captured, spotted lantern flies on the photo paper, stepping on them, and then placing it under glass and out in the sun to expose for a couple hours.
I call them, like, "squash" them.
So, physically squashing the bug under glass, and the shoe prints came out really lovely.
I am a historical process photographer, and I work with historical processes in really experimental ways.
The reason I got into doing this type of work was that I was just so burnt out from digital photography.
I hated sitting in front of a computer for hours on end after a photo shoot.
I felt like a part of my art practice was missing, and I realized that what was missing was how I was trained.
I was classically trained in a dark room, and I was just missing that more hands-on approach to kind of getting your hands dirty to make your artwork.
At that point, I decided that I had to do something.
So, pinhole to me seemed like the exact opposite of digital photography.
And I dove into that first and then started exploring with other mediums.
Pinhole photography is the most simple form of a camera, and it's the oldest form of photography, as well.
It's a lightproof box.
It can be any size, the size of a house or the size of an Altoids container.
And then you just poke a little, tiny pinhole in the front of it with either a needle or a pin of some sort and allow the light to come through, and it creates an image.
It's upside down and backwards.
It's basically a camera obscura that you can put a light-sensitive surface inside of.
I think most photographers think waiting five seconds is a long time for a photo, and with solargraphy you have to at least wait a whole day, if not a week or a month or a year.
That's the sun moving in the sky from, you know, east to west every single day.
And every day it moves, depending on if it's winter or summer, it'll move, like, a little bit lower in the sky or a little bit higher in the sky.
So, each streak is one day of sun.
And if there's ever a time where there's a gap in the streaks, that's because there was no sun during that day or hour.
So, here you can see that there's one streak that goes, like, the whole way and there's no sun there.
There's a gap between the streaks.
So, that was just, like, one really cloudy or maybe a rainy day.
At first, I was interested in just capturing the sun, and I did focus mostly on nature, which I will say, throughout my whole career most of my artwork has been focused on nature.
I chose the Pine Barrens because it was a forest in an area of New Jersey that I had never really explored before.
Because it's such a mysterious place to me, I thought that pinhole photography would definitely be the medium to explore it with.
I do pin all of my cameras on Google Maps, so I'll have, like, a geo marking of where they are, but I have found that it's not always completely accurate.
So, it'll be, like, within a 50-yard radius that I have to try to find, like, what tree the camera is on.
So, that's always really fun.
It's been described, or I've been described, as a squirrel looking for their nuts.
But once you do find the camera, bring it back to my studio, and then I will scan the image and then the image, I bring it into Adobe Photoshop.
I invert it from negative to positive, flip it horizontal because the image was created both upside down and backwards.
So, flip it horizontal so that it's like "true" photograph.
And then I bring that image into Adobe Lightroom and will process it.
I usually just bring it to life by adding a little exposure and contrast.
I don't do any serious tweaking of colors to the images, so I try to keep them pretty natural.
It definitely has inspired me as a human and an artist.
It definitely, like, fills that hole that I felt was missing.
And solargraphy specifically has taught me a lot of patience.
I feel like I'm a different person than I was six or seven years ago, before I had started this.
I've definitely learned patience.
I've learned how to lose control in my artwork.
I was always an artist that wanted control over everything.
Working in this way has really kind of broken that habit and allowed me to accept the chance element, not only in my work, but just in life in general.