Artists

The images on exhibit at Love Your Tree are the work of 16 women photographers, each uniquely exploring the mystery, power and questions to be found in a woman's body. Each image evokes its own theatre of self-inquiry.

In Jackie Hayden's photograph, a large woman leaps into the air, her legs spread wide. Matuschka looks hot and fierce in her self-portrait, a delicate floral tattoo covering the area where her breast was removed. In Stephanie Sinclair's photograph, an Afghan woman sits alone in the hospital, after being treated for the burns she inflicted on herself. Hannah Wilke is rapturous, brimming with vitality in one image and bald from chemotherapy in the next image.

The art in this show expands upon the idea that we are all mirrors of one another - engaged in archetypal agonies and ecstasies that are experienced and expressed through our bodies.

These particular images were selected as a body narrative to open and deepen a dialogue about how poignant, injured, angry, defiant, questioning, proud, striving, daring and beautiful we all truly are.

Paula Allen
Paula Allen, curator of the Love Your Tree exhibit and documentary photographer, has dedicated her work to recording the courageous and often invisible struggles of women and girls all over the world. Her images have appeared in many major publications including Newsweek, Marie Claire, The New York Times Magazine, and Oprah. Presently, she is working with Amnesty International on their "Stop Violence Against Women Campaign." The Installation included in this exhibit reveals how the changing landscape of a women's body speaks the stories she has lived.

Jacqueline Hayden
Jacqueline Hayden is an artist whose work challenges the culturally defined image of the ideal self. She holds an MFA from Yale University, has received many grants and fellowships and has taught at several arts institutions including Hampshire College where she is currently Professor of Film and Photography. The three works in this show are images of figure models. She works with her subjects to address questions of beauty, youth and impending mortality.

Josefa Mulaire
Josefa Mulaire's images have been seen in solo and group shows throughout the United States. She is a graduate of Bard College and has an MFA in photography from Syracuse University. The image included in this exhibit is from a series entitled "Cuts" in which she carves childlike images into her flesh, images which suggest innocence yet speak simultaneously of the betrayal of innocence.

Carla Williams
Carla Williams is a photographer, historian and writer. She has contributed to numerous publications and co-created with Deborah Willis, "The Black Female Body: A Photographic History." In the piece included in this exhibit she explores the effects of time and life experience on her own body, confronting us with the values, aesthetics and de facto censorship we bring to bodies that don't fit an arbitrary ideal.

Susan Jahoda
Susan Jahoda is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes photography, performance, installation, video and curatorial projects. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and her work has been exhibited and published widely in both Europe and North America. The mixed media piece included in this exhibit explores the struggle against self and culturally bound roles within the family context. Susan is a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches photography at Rhode Island School of Design.

Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie is widely known for her photographic series of "Portraits," straight-forward c-prints whose composition owes much to that of classical portraiture, but whose sitters are either gay or transgender peers. Her photographs have been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries throughout the world and featured, countless times, in books and periodicals. Cathy is Professor of Photography at University of California. Los Angeles.

Stephanie Sinclair
Stephanie Sinclair photographs news and social issues in the Middle East and South East Asia. Her work has been seen in many major publications including Time, Newsweek, Fortune and The New York Times Magazine. The image included in this exhibit portrays one of the growing number of Afghan women who self-immolate as a cry for help. For this work, Stephanie was awarded the Word Press News Photo Award.

Matuschka
Matuschka is a Pulitzer Prize nominee whose twenty-five years of work explore the power of a woman looking at her own body as a metaphor for the issues that concern us all. She has received numerous scholarships and her work has been seen on the covers of such publications as The New York Times, McLeans and German Max. The image included in this exhibit, her most well-known, was published in Life magazine's "One Hundred Pictures that Changed the World."

Deana Lawson
Deana Lawson's images explore the body as a container of secrets. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she has been the recipient of several fellowships, grants and awards. Her work has been seen in numerous shows throughout the eastern United States. In the two photographs included in this show, Deana works with her mother and her niece exploring questions of appearance, reality and the distance between truth and fiction.

Joan Brown
Joan Brown studied at The International Center of Photography and has shown her work in the United States and Europe. In her piece, "Facing Time," she documents her recovery process after plastic surgery.

Hannah Wilke
Hannah Wilke was one of the first artists to deal directly with feminist issues in the late 1950's. She invented a "female iconography" based on organic forms related to bodily and vaginal imagery. The two works included in this exhibit are self-portraits, one from early in her career and one during her final illness, exploring scarification as a modus of both beauty and inner wounding.

Flor Garduno
Flor Garduño is a Mexican photographer whose work is included in the collections of such public institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliot¸que Nationale of Paris. Many of her works, including the two included in this exhibit, explore the liminal territory where human and animal, human and vegetable converge.

Wendy Ewald
Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children, young people and women's groups throughout the world to turn their experiences and dreams into powerful, poetic images. She is a research scholar at the Center for International Studies and the Program in Education at Duke University. She has received numerous awards, and has authored 12 books of photography. The two images included in this exhibit were created as part of a workshop for women and girls in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Mary Roehm
Mary Roehm is both subject and artist in the collaborative installation (with photographer Paula Allen) included in this exhibit. The image of her body, transformed by a series of operations and the concomitant rapid loss of 165 pounds stands in dialogue with a series of her own watercolor images. Mary is a Professor of Art and head of the ceramics department at SUNY New Paltz, New York.

Rummana Hussain
Rumana Hussain was born in Mumbai, India. Before she lost her battle with cancer in 1999, she created a number of performances and installations dealing with illness and spirituality and their effect on the human body. The text included in this exhibit is from one such creation. A graduate of Ravensborne College of Art and Design (UK), she has received numerous grants and awards and her exhibits have been seen in India, Norway, England, Australia and the USA.

Alexandra Jacoby
Alexandra Jacoby's photographs capture the rarely seen diversity and beauty of the vagina. She is a self-taught painter and photographer and has exhibited in galleries and alternative spaces. Alexandra holds two Bachelor's Degrees, one in English Literature and one in Psychology. The series of vagina portraits included in this exhibit are part of a larger book project entitled vagina vérité.