Creating a portrait of an age when exploration was life’s supreme adventure.
Firehouse Center to host exhibit by award-winning photographer Eva Timothy
Eva Timothy’s Lost in Learning has attracted a fair amount of attention with those of highly respected purviews. The book, published last year, has been collected by the U. S. Library of Congress – Permanent Collection, the British Library, the Fox Talbot Museum and the Victoria Albert Museum – National Art Library, the University of Oxford, England at Green Templeton College, and the Michigan State University Rare Books Special Collections. You can view the exhibit Lost in Learning at the Firehouse Center for the Arts (Market Square, Newburyport) now through October 9 during regular Box Office hours (Wed-Sun, 12N-5P or until curtain). This exhibit is free and open to the public.
For thousands of years magnificent minds have been trying to discover the one thing without which a life would not be. Is it possible that it is learning? Our ability as humans to acquire knowledge has shaped our world for good and for ill. Knowledge is power. The insatiable thirst for knowledge and power that we humans possess has transformed individuals, families, societies and indeed, the entire world.
How is it then that we have allowed learning to become reduced to that thing which is done in order to pass a test, or to get a degree to enable one to make more money?
Award-winning photographer Eva Timothy invites us all to be “learners…not simply of fiscal necessity…but willful wanderers into the great unknown.” She believes that art’s purpose is “to empower us in looking beyond the dulling distractions and to focus on our noblest aspirations in life.” To that end she has created photographs that depict an age in the story of mankind when exploration into the unknown fostered voyages across seas, not knowing if on the other side there was another world, or if the explorers themselves would be consumed by the terrors that existed at the end of the world — then commonly drawn as dragons and hellish pits of fire.
Her exhibit Lost in Learning celebrates the spirit of the wanderers, the explorers, the creators, the scientists and the seekers who have created history and changed the world with their unbridled creativity and their quests to discover the “why?” of their days and the “how?” of their lifetimes. The ramifications of their hunts have been earthshaking and have taken humanity on rides into the depths of the surrounding oceans, to outer space and into the intricacies that make up the pathways between thought and action in our own bodies.
We have, as a culture, always memorialized these thinkers and dreamers in our museums and in countless statues erected throughout our cities, but Ms Timothy strives to find a deeper lesson in their discoveries: not just the names, the dates and the lists of accomplishments. She wonders if perhaps in looking deeper at the souls of the great minds that have gone before that perhaps we might see a glimmer of ourselves and thereby awaken something marvelous that has been dormant.
“Too much of education has become distilled to bit-size, memorizable chunks. We’ve built great walls between art and science and then condensed them to a series of facts and principles. In so doing we’ve made learning more “manageable”, but we’ve [lost] much of what made it appetizing in the first place” says the photographer.
“Learning is an invitation to embark upon the journey of a lifetime,” says Ms. Timothy. Join her as she focuses her camera on the gifts of geniuses that have come before. With a change of perspective Ms. Timothy causes one word on the composition of Handel’s Messiah that was written in Handel’s own hand to lift off the page. In doing so she encapsulates the epitome of the work itself: “Hallelujah” rises up and bursts forth as if freed from the musical staff that previously held it; and the visual cue provided by Timothy is enough to stir the orchestral track that resides in our brains, in our souls. What a sweet tribute to the master of the music and what a powerful nod to the essence of the unbreakable human spirit: The spirit creates, the creation awakens the spirit.
“As a photographer, I have found the camera lens to be an apt metaphor for our own lives. We choose our focal points. We determine how much light to let in. We decide whether to view life through the dreary windows of skepticism or through the lens of hope and opportunity,” says Timothy. Be determined to allow Lost in Learning into your schedule — it may be life altering.
About the Artist: Eva Timothy is a Media/ Communications graduate with a B.A. from the University of Utah and she studied at Oxford School of Photography in the U.K. She holds a Licentiate Certification from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and is currently an instructor at the Newburyport Art Association.
Her monograph, “Lost in Learning” was awarded First Place, People’s Choice at the Px3 Competition and was a finalist for the Julia Margaret Cameron Award. The book, Lost in Learning: The Art of Discovery was published in September 2010. The book has recently been collected by the U. S. Library of Congress – Permanent Collection, The British Library, The Fox Talbot Museum and the Victoria Albert Museum – National Art Library, the University of Oxford, England at Green Templeton College, and the Michigan State University Rare Books Special Collections. Eva Timothy is represented by Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA.
Calendar Listing
WHAT: Lost in Learning
WHEN: Now through October 9, 2011 Wed-Sun, 12N-5P (or until curtain)
WHERE: Firehouse Center for the Arts, Market Square, Newburyport, MA
TICKETS: This event is free and open to the public. For more info please call the Box Office at 978/462-7336 or visit online at www.firehouse.org .
NOTE: There is no reception planned for this exhibit
About The Firehouse Center for the Arts- The Firehouse Center for the Arts is a member-based 501©3 non-profit organization located on the waterfront in Newburyport, with a 195-seat theater. The Firehouse offers “arts inspired experiences” including film, dance, theatre, concerts, children’s programming, a new works festival, and an art gallery which exhibits works by local and international artists. The Firehouse is handicap accessible. Visit www.firehouse.org to learn more.
