Holiday – Carolyn Benedict Fraser – Space 204 (art exhibition)
Holiday
Carolyn Benedict Fraser
August 29 – September 27, 2024
The Vanderbilt University Department of Art and Space 204 announces Holiday – a solo exhibition from Carolyn Benedict Fraser, a Nashville based photographer, artist, and educator. Holiday presents a series of images taken from the balconies from each room of the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, a view that faces West End Avenue over-looking Centennial Park.
Artist Statement:
Similar to building a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, an act undertaken in 1897 for the World’s Fair, taking a picture is an outlet for the impulse to replicate a time and a place so we can experience it later and from a distance.
When photographing from the balcony of each room at the Holiday Inn that overlooks Centennial Park and Nashville’s Parthenon, I am aware these pictures might already exist. I bet you could cobble together the same grid with images captured over the last fifty-five years that are tucked away in an attic, latent on an undeveloped roll of film, inaccessible on an outdated digital camera, lost in the sea of images on a smartphone, or in a photo book like the one that inspired this series — The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston, where he photographed from one of the rooms.
I am not attempting to create new images. Instead, I am using the hotel as a framework to consider the longing, curiosity, and desire to position ourselves outside of our immediate experience. Like the creation of the photograph, panorama, stereograph, and more recently, new forms of digital technology, this series reflects on the persistent urge to immerse ourselves in places other than where we are and questions whether we will ever be satisfied with our attempts to do so.
Artist Bio:
Carolyn Benedict Fraser is a photographer and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work utilizes the constraints of the camera, the frame, and vision to address how we orient ourselves to mental and physical limitations. She studied psychology and photography at Mills College in Oakland, California, and received an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University. She presented her work at the 2017 SPE North Eastern Conference, Is Photography Enough?: Interdisciplinary Approaches Beyond the Still Image. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at Site:Brooklyn in Brooklyn, New York, Washington State University, the Millepiani Gallery in Rome, Italy, Medium Photo in San Diego, and Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville.
Exhibition and reception:
Holiday will be on view in Space 204 from August 29 – September 27, 2024 and will open with a reception on August 29, 2024 from 3pm to 5pm in Space 204. The gallery is located on the second floor of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center. Gallery hours are Mondays thru Fridays 10am to 4pm.
Acknowledgements:
The Holiday exhibition exists in part (a big part) to the generosity and collaborative efforts for the management and staff team at the Holiday Inn – Vanderbilt (West End). Without their help in communicating and granting access to the West End side balconies, Carolyn would not have been able to capture the 154 views in still images – leading to the subsequent works featured in the exhibition.