In Time
Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer
Exhibition Dates:
June 23, 2023 - August 18, 2023
Opening Reception:
Friday, June 23, 2023, 5:00-9:00pm
Artist Talks:
Saturday, June 24 @ 11:00am
Rivalry Projects is excited to present In Time, an exhibition with Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer. Longstanding collaborators and friends, Bosworth and Sheffer document the vastness and uncertainty of our natural world to examine creation, corporeality, and our tenuous relationship with a changing environment. The presentation, their first with the gallery, will be on view from June 23-August 18, 2023. Join us for an Opening Reception for this exhibit on Friday, June 23, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 pm. This exhibition will be on view in tandem with an exhibition of photographs by David Hilliard in Rivalry’s Project Space.
The sea - its serenity, volatility, and awe-inspiring ability to transform sky, water, and light - has forever captivated Barabra Bosworth. The works in this exhibition depict the sea, its emotion, and unbridled wildness.
Emily Sheffer’s photographs use clay and landscape as a keyhole through which creation myths can be examined and unpacked. Driven by her interests in ancient visual culture, geology, and pottery, her images create a photographic experience that examines the earth itself as life-giving matter.
Barbara Bosworth + Emily Sheffer: In Time evokes calm introspection, romance, and poetry, while these photographs probe a deeply unknowable and overpowering natural force, a contradiction that has drawn people to shorelines for millennia.
WORKS
“The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. It’s light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue.”
INSTALLATION VIEWS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Barbara Bosworth (b. 1953) is a photographer whose large-format images explore both overt and subtle relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Whether chronicling the efforts of hunters or bird banders or evoking the seasonal changes that transform mountains and meadows, Bosworth’s caring attention to the world around her results in images that similarly inspire viewers to look closely.
Bosworth grew up in Novelty, Ohio. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is professor emeritus of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Bosworth’s work has been widely exhibited, notably in retrospectives at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Her previous publications include, The Heavens (Radius Books, 2018), The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015), Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013), From Where the Sun Now Stands (Dust Collective, 2019), Behold (Datz Press, 2014), Trees: National Champions (MIT Press; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2005).
Emily Sheffer (b. 1993) is a photographic artist, educator, and book designer. She is the founder of Dust Collective, a handmade photography book publisher, and has published over a dozen artist books. She earned her BFA in Photography with Departmental Honors from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2015. In 2019, Maine Media Workshops invited Emily to be their book-artist-in-residence. Emily graduated in 2022 from The University of Hartford Photography MFA program, where she was awarded the Merit Scholarship. In 2022, Emily completed a residency with Tusen Takk Foundation with collaborator Barbara Bosworth. She currently works as a studio director and visiting professor of photography in New England.