The 350th Anniversary Steering Committee is proud to announce the continuation of its historical photography exhibit that highlights the history of the Town and its people over the past couple hundred years. The second installment of this popular exhibition is titled “Growing Southbury” and will run November 2 – 29, 2023 in the Gloria Cachion Gallery at the Southbury Public Library.

This month features a completely new set of photographs that are mix of old and newer ones, curated from the collections of Southbury Historical Society, Heritage Village Foundation, Southbury Land Trust, Bent of the River Audubon Center, Ludorf Family, Robert S. Bryan and many others.

This free photographic exhibit is the second of three months worth of changing images that celebrate some of Southbury’s outstanding people, places, institutions, and events. The changing exhibit is over a three-month period from October to December.

The first offering, “Early Southbury”, ran the month of October and has been very well-received. Guest book comments include: “Great Exhibit. Items I had not seen before in other history books.” “Spectacular pics! And extremely helpful captions.” “Interesting step back in time.” “A trip through the past.”

Captions for the photographs are once again provided by John Dwyer, Town historian and co-chair of the 350th Committee, and Melinda Elliott, Southbury Historical Society President and 350th Committee member. Gosia Liedlich, the town’s Digital Communications Specialist and a member of the 350th Anniversary Committee, was the point person for this project, including collecting and assembling the photographs.

The 350th Anniversary Steering Committee hopes that residents and visitors will return for this second offering, learn something new about the town and come away with a deeper appreciation of Southbury.

The exhibit will be open during regular library hours which are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:30am to 5:30pm, Tuesday and Thursday 9:30am to 9:00pm, Saturdays 9:30am to 4:00pm and Sundays 12:00pm to 5:00pm. Please note, that the library will be closed for on Friday, November 10, Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24, 2023.

Gallery link https://www.southburylibrary.org/using-the-library/spaces/art-gallery

The Town of Southbury is holding events and activities all year long to celebrate 350 years of community, culture and history (1673-2023), aimed at highlighting the past and progress of the one and only Southbury.

The 350th Anniversary Steering Committee is: John Dwyer and Kevin Bielmeier (co-chairs), Brian Jones (vice-chair), Justin Bette, Lynn Dwyer, Melinda Elliott, Michael Ganem, Kara Kenney, Mary Korsu, and Gosia Liedlich.

For more information on all the 350th events, visit www.southbury-ct.org/350.

Alida O’Loughlin presents us with more than 40 treasured moments in her new exhibition by the same title at the Edgartown library, through the end of November.

For such a prolific artist, it’s amazing to learn that O’Loughlin didn’t take photography seriously until her 70s. She came to the U.S. from her native Holland as a graduate student in 1951 with $80 in her pocket. As a single mother of three kids in four years, her career was in politics, working with international nonprofit organizations. “Life has always been one of hard work and making sure people get provided for,” O’Loughlin tells me.

“I’m not a photographer. I came to it accidentally in the course of time,” she explains. Although O’Loughlin had been using a point-and-shoot camera to take photos for her own pleasure, it wasn’t until her partner, artist Washington Ledesma, enlarged and framed one of her works as a present that she even entertained the idea of it as a profession. “I looked at the photograph and was quite shocked because I thought it looked very good. From that time on, photography became a more serious business for me,” she says. “Bit by bit, I started developing the shots, and people were ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ about them.”

O’Loughlin started selling here at the artisan fairs, and had exhibits in Boston and Cambridge. “I was able to do it with the help of Washington. I wasn’t wandering out in the desert by myself by any means. So I became a photographer, which was a surprise. My life had been about politics,” she adds.

As we look through her broad scope of work, O’Loughlin repeatedly emphasizes, “I never became a technical photographer. I couldn’t get into cameras and settings and all that sort of stuff. Basically, I worked with what I saw. If I catch it, great, wonderful. If not — nothing lost. I did not manipulate.” In fact, it took her a long time to switch from film when digital cameras initially came on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s. “I said, My eyes do not see digitally. When I see something, I focus, and everything else becomes background, but with digital, everything is sharp. At some point, everybody became a photographer, and it became much more important to manipulate things digitally, so I stopped exhibiting.”

Shooting just for herself again, O’Loughlin says, “I became more and more interested in what I saw that other people didn’t see; that intrigued me.” And her sharp eye is evident throughout the exhibit. The show starts with that first “official” photograph Ledesma framed — the icy cold winter image of the Shenandoah at the pier in Vineyard Haven in the early 2000s, and her final piece, titled “Urban Energy.” The composition of a teeming construction site at South Station in Boston pulses with industrial energy.

The rest of the show, however, is about nature — sometimes up close, sometimes from a distance. The images are grouped by themes, the initial one being intimate portraits of tree bark. By isolating sections of tree trunks, O’Loughlin revels in their texture, patterns, and colors. They become abstract compositions from which images emerge, like a sensuous woman’s naked body in one, or Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” in another.

O’Loughlin’s next grouping is landscapes, and close-ups of flowers reflect a keen sensitivity to natural beauty. The story of how she became sensitive to looking at nature is poignant. “I learned to see thanks to the Nazi occupation of Holland. Young people weren’t allowed to gather together. All the youth groups were disbanded except the Netherlands Youth Bond for the Study of Nature,” she shares. “I joined when I was 12 years old. They would go out on Sunday excursions to the woods for birdwatching and identification of bird songs, moss, and trees.”

O’Loughlin’s eye for nature is also apparent in her grouping of seascapes. Here, the light is particularly striking, with the sun setting and creating distinctly atmospheric scenes. While different from one another, a sense of calm descends on them all, and augments the beauty and awe of the world around us.

In her artist statement, O’Loughlin writes, “There are all these sudden moments when I see the composition of the elements, and sometimes I have my camera with me, and sometimes my camera is capable of catching that one specific instant. These photographs are what they are — a conscious moment in time, a moment of light, not retouched or altered in any way. I hope the viewer will find some enjoyment of recognition in what my eyes and camera experience.”

O’Loughlin also hopes that after viewing her art, people will realize, as she says, “There is a whole world out there of many different forms and shapes … stop and think about how it makes you feel.”

“Treasured Moments” will be on view at the Edgartown library through the end of November.

YEREVAN—Armenia-based photographer and artist David Galstyan’s latest exhibition Nebula is “a story of alchemy: how the mundane transforms into a cosmic phenomenon,” in his words, offering a unique take on the so-called mundane, everyday elements of life. On the day of the opening ceremony of the exhibition on October 28, the moon was passing into the earth’s shadow, creating a partial lunar eclipse. This coincidental alignment made the exhibition even more enchanting and magical, leaving the guests in awe of both the artworks and the overall atmosphere at Latitude Art Space in Yerevan.

Running for two weeks, the exhibition contains over 40 scanographies, each one containing a piece of the home of the Armenian people. As Galstyan put it, the components of the artworks are “anything that is gathered from the ground. I have found these things in my own land. They represent my culture in its most grounded and physical way.” Although each art piece is open for interpretation, abstracted elements of fire, dirt, tree branches and more can be found in them. “To take something unimportant or something ordinary and to showcase it for it to gain life and form and for others to see. Something you step on – to see its beauty,” the artist reflected.

Born and raised in Yerevan, Galstyan studied acting at the State Theatre Institute in Yerevan. It did not take long for Galstyan to find his calling. “After serving in the army, I changed my path and began to express myself through photography,” he said. “I changed my path and found photography more close to my heart.”

For over a decade now, Galstyan’s works have been exhibited both locally and internationally, including at the Emerging Arts Exhibition in New York in 2012, the sixth Beijing International Art Biennale in 2015, the “Hello World. Revising a Collection” Berlin exhibition at Nationalgalerie Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum fur Gegenwart in 2018 and more. Galstyan was also the cameraman for Lucine Talalyan’s experimental film Post DIY, Adrine Grigoryan’s documentary film Bavakan and the Turkish documentary film A Piece of Armenia. 

“Art allows us to raise questions that otherwise we cannot. Art allows us to raise questions that other fields may not allow,” Galstyan said regarding the role of art in society. At the core of his beliefs, he thinks that in many ways, art reminds people not to think inside of a box. Reflecting on Nebula, the artist admitted, “I cannot say what the influence will be, because we have to allow people to integrate and process that which they saw.”

Galstyan’s technique for the exhibition was scanography. For the creation of each art piece, the artist used a basic scanner, but with a slightly different method than the norm – he chose not to close the top of the scanner. By leaving the scanner open, the information that each piece contains is infinite. There is no limitation on what each piece represents or how it is interpreted. “Because I cannot limit myself to a specific niche, this is an expression of this period of my life, as simple as something that reflects my current times,” he said. 

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Galstyan’s studio is at the Art Factory, which is in the same building as the Latitude Art Space. Latitude is an Art Space by the Yerevan Biennial Art Foundation (YBAF), whose mission is to showcase and support Armenian art. Galstyan is the newest member of the foundation, and this was his first exhibition with YBAF.

Latitude Art Space invites everyone to come and check out this exhibition, “where the mundane transcends into cosmic marvels, inviting us to ponder the magic within the every day.” It will run until November 11, and visitors can view the exhibit between Thursday-Saturday from 2:00-7:00 p.m. All the artworks featured in the exhibition are for sale, and a portion of proceeds will go to help families in need from Artsakh.

Hena Aposhian

Hena Aposhian is a freelance journalist who primarily focuses on Armenian arts & culture. She is a graduate of the American University of Armenia and holds a bachelor’s degree in English & Communications.

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