All images © Jennifer Schlesinger
Thanks to Jennifer Schlesinger for offering up her images for consideration. I´ll introduce the project via her artist statement which reads as follows:
"As I grow older - raise my daughter, create my own family - I have gained a new appreciation for objects gifted to me from my relatives whom are no longer living. These objects are the only memory I have of them now. For this series, I photographed objects of mine and other's that were gifted, to recreate the sacred object into a new mileu- the life influenced by the current keeper. We breathe our spirit into these objects, and we use them with the spirit of the person who gave them to us, they become an `Object diaspora´. These images are taken with a large format pinhole camera. They are gelatin silver prints on 8x10” Foma paper."
Jennifer Schlesinger is a Connecticut native, who graduated from the College of Santa Fe in 1998 with a B.A. in Photography and Journalism. Jennifer has taught photography for various organizations and schools and has been an adjunct faculty member in the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, College of Santa Fe. She has been investigating the world through photography for over twelve years and has exhibited at numerous colleges, art organizations and galleries including Southwest regional venues such as Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe), Eastern New Mexico University, and Santa Fe Art Institute as well as nationally, such as the Portland Northwest College of Art, the Chelsea Art Museum and most recently at the Bridge Art Fair in Chicago. Her work has been published in numerous catalogues and magazines, and is represented in many private as well as public collections including the Huntington Botanical Art Collections in California and the The New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe. In 2005 she received three honors of recognition; a grant from the New Mexico Arts Division; a Golden Light Award in Landscape Photography by the Maine Photographic Workshops and she was a finalist in the Willard Van Dyke Grant given by the New Mexico Center for Photography. In 2007 she was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography by The Center and the Eliot Porter Fellowship by the New Mexico Council on Photography. And in 2007 she was also awarded the Center for Contemporary Arts Photography Auction Award.
