Fall 2022: Group Shows in CA and MN

December 8, 2022joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

California

The Coachella Valley, like Santa Fe, is an artists’ mecca. The nine municipalities in the Valley are home to 370,000 permanent residents and this swells by another 100,000-200,000 during the “season,” the winter months that attract snow birds. There are numerous creative arts centers, collections of studios, and galleries across the valley, extending from Palm Springs to Coachella. Art walks, gallery openings, studio tours abound and I was pleased to be able to participate in two exhibitions happening in October and November this year.

The CREATE Center for the Arts in Palm Desert hosted an 8 week community show of mixed media work by its members as well as an invited group of artists to which I belong. These two old favorites of mine were hung.

The second show, all photographers, was by invitation from the Old Town Artisan Studios in La Quinta. It was called In Focus and lasted only a couple of weeks in October. Here’s what I submitted.

Zabriskie Point Sunset on the left and, on the right, A Proper Perspective.

Minnesota

The Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis has continuously changing international photography exhibitions. These shows are juried and cover a wide range of themes. I seem to do best with my black and white images and was happy to be included in the latest Black and White exhibition. The image juried in is below.

**Manly Beacon (**Death Valley National Park)

A Note About My Books

On the right panel, at the top, you see a block about books of my photographs that I have published over the years. The image shows three early books published using Blurb software and I have added three more to that collection: Monkey Business: Wildlife Sightings on the Osa Peninsula, Superbloom 2019, and The Big Picture: Panoramas. These are all still available from Blurb but the four other books I’ve published, using Zno software, are no longer available. It seems that Zno has updated their software and no longer is willing to archive books made with the old software.

I chose Zno at the time, 2015, because they were the only one offering the lay flat option, the feature that allows for a image to go across two pages without the distortion of the center fold. Since then, other publishers, including Blurb, offer this option. There may be other advantages to Zno but given my recent experience with them I’ll stick with Blurb for future books. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Summer 2022: A Couple of Upcoming Shows

July 7, 2022joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

Rocks and Ruins at the Vista Grande Public Library, September, 2022

Reception: Friday, September 9, 3:30 – 5:00 pm

In a recent Pasatiempo article Santa Fe photographer Alex Traube says “I couldn’t help photograph that rock…and start doing things with it and become enchanted. I surrender to that enchantment.” I too cannot help photographing rocks and, as it happens, ruins. I am drawn to them: a single pebble on a beach, a fat boulder in a sea of pebbles, a collapsed schoolhouse, an abandoned barn. Some rock formations are so fantastic everyone would want to photograph them. The scant but alluring remains of ancient indigenous settlements (such as Hovenweep, pictured above) have attracted photographers since cameras were invented.

Rocks and ruins are part of the landscape and, in this part of the country, ubiquitous. Hundreds of ghost towns, both ancient and relatively modern, dot New Mexico’s map. The land is rife with long extinct volcanic cones which spewed boulders across its surface. The result in both cases is a compelling geometry of light, lines, textures and shadows.

Rocks and ruins both contrast and complement each other. Rocks are solid, often immovable, randomly placed. They suggest permanence, stasis. Ruins are transitory, fragile looking, placed initially with purpose. Both have stories to tell: rocks of the earth’s history, ruins of human intentions. Both evoke questions: how were these solid things that look like peanut butter created? why were these ruins abandoned? The most ancient, enduring ruins were made of stone.

All of that and alliteration too.

El Gancho

El Gancho is a local (104 Old Las Vegas Hwy in Santa Fe) fitness center with tons of wall space they like to have covered with art. A friend was invited to hang her photographs for the month of August but found the space overwhelming and invited a couple of other photographers, to join her. Here’s a poster I made to introduce us to the patrons.

I plan to hang some old favorites:

and there is some wall space just opposite the child care center that I think will be perfect for those Costa Rica monkey pictures for which I promised to make a new gallery (and that may still happen..):

The El Gancho show will be up from August 1 through August 30, 2022.

Reception Cancelled for Panorama Exhibit

September 1, 2021joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

Owing to a snafu with the original reception date and given the current surges of COVID cases, new and breakthrough, I decided to cancel the reception for this exhibit. No sense in exposing myself and others unnecessarily. Do stop by the library if you are in the area in September. I just hung the show today and it looks quite nice. You’ll find a number of the hanging images here and below are a some that are newer.

Font’s Point, Anza Borrego Desert State Park

A Non Virtual Show 🤞

August 14, 2021joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

Our local library has resumed on site art exhibitions and I will be the featured artist for this September (provided the delta variant doesn’t close us down again).. Here’s one of the posters I’ve created to publicize the show. Do stop by if you’re in the area: Vista Grange Public Library, 14 Avenida Torreon, Santa Fe, NM 87505. Reception Saturday, Sept. 4, 1-3 pm.

What a Year!

July 24, 2020September 4, 2020joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

This year started out great for photography with acceptance into the 2020 Anza Borrego Desert Photo Contest . This contest was preceded, in the spring of 2019, by a spectacular super bloom in the Coachella Valley and surrounding areas, a super bloom of quality and quantity that had not been seen in decades. And I was there for both of these shows!

Anza Borrego Desert Photo Contest

One of my favorite places is the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in southeastern CA. It covers over 600,000 acres of wilderness and mountains, much of it inaccessible except on foot. What is accessible are vast areas of badlands, palm oases, slot canyons, 4 wheel drive roads, broad vistas – a landscape photographer’s paradise. Each year a photo contest, limited to images taken within the park boundaries, entices hundreds of photographers to show their work.

Although photographing there for years, it did not occur to me to enter the photo contest until last summer, after having spent many hours pursuing the fabulous wildflowers of the super bloom. I had lots of images to choose from and submitted, digitally, the 10 allowed. I was surprised and pleased when 8 of those 10 made the first cut, the final couple hundred from which the judges would pick winners in each of the six categories. Submission then required the images to be printed, mounted and delivered to Borrego Springs, a small town that sits in the middle of the Park. Wintering now in the Coachella Valley, it was a pleasure for me to make the delivery. Here are the 8.

The last two images, Palm Oasis and Feast for a Desert Prince, were awarded Honorable Mention in the Black and White and Animals category, respectively, and were displayed, along with all the winners, during the month of February at the Borrego Art Institute in Borrego Springs. At the excellent critique session that preceded the opening reception I discovered, to my surprise, that almost all the winners were local, professional photographers. I was in very good company.

Super Bloom 2019

The images above with wildflowers were taken in the spring of 2019 during that amazing super bloom. I was enchanted with the wildflowers, vast fields of which replaced the drab greens, grays and tans of the desert with purple, pink, yellow and white. They appeared not only in the expanses of the neighboring parks but also on every vacant lot, every patch of bare ground in the urban sprawl of the Coachella Valley.

I marveled at the vistas, but also saw stunning arrangements of flower varieties set among rocks, in dry arroyos, up hillsides and, of course, individual flowers. I photographed them all hoping, someday, someway to give others a glimpse of this glory. A book? Sure, but then I was daunted by the task of identifying all those flowers and just set the whole idea aside. The Anza Borrego Photo Contest spurred me to cull these photos for suitable entries, but the real motivator to create a book was the COVID19 pandemic with its mandated stay at home regimen.

The book, Super Bloom 2019, was just published by Blurb, You can see a preview of the whole book here. What follows are some of the images not in the book.

Sky’s the Limit: New Mexico

September 4, 2019joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

The New Mexico Art League’s latest exhibition features representations – in a variety of media – of the fabulous skies in this state. All three of my submissions were accepted (a first) and the one above was taken right up the street from my house. It’s titled Eldorado, the name of our little unincorporated community about 12 mile southeast of Santa Fe.

Another image, A Proper Perspective, is a variation on a theme. You’ve seen it before in black and white. Here is the color version.

A Proper Perspective

The third image, Virgas, may also be in a gallery on this site, called there Into the Rain. It was taken in NE New Mexico, near a town called Roy, where the land begins to become plains. I changed the title because on closer examination I thought the rain wasn’t actually reaching the ground, hence virgas. What do you think?

Virgas

Lay of the Land New Mexico

August 4, 2018August 4, 2018joan biordi, photographer 2 Comments

The New Mexico Art League has juried in two of my images for the above titled exhibition. It will be an exhibition of prints, drawings, paintings, mixed media and photographs. That’s quite a mix so I’m pleased to have been included. The image above, Gorge, is one of them and the other is O’Keefe Country, below.

Not far from Abiquiu, NM

The show runs from Sept. 4 through Oct. 6, 2018 at the Art League, click for directions. More information about the Art League and its programs can be found here.

Trees: A Show at the Vista Grande Library

May 7, 2018May 7, 2018joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

Some thoughts about trees

Most of us are familiar with Joyce Kilmer’s poem with its vivid imagery of trees suckling at the breast of mother earth and his self-description as a fool for trying to describe in words such a magnificent creation. I share his frustration.

I am always attracted to trees, to the patterns and textures shown by the bark, the limbs and sometimes even the leaves. Their visual complexity is alluring, especially in the spring when the gloriously complex structure of deciduous trees are tinged with a delicate yellow green halo of small leaves.

I’m often tempted to anthropomorphize: trees “hide” their structure with a covering of leaves or needles; some “show off” with stunning coats of color in the Fall; all “go with the flow” of wind and weather. But here is a lovely example of the opposite:

“When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreen and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You’re too this or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

-Ram Dass

I hope you will enjoy the woods that I have created.

Here are some images of trees that do not appear elsewhere on this site.

Look Up!

Angkor Province, Cambodia

New Mexico Art League’s Black and White Show

March 31, 2018April 17, 2018joan biordi, photographer 1 Comment

Black and White: An Exhibition of Drawings and Photographs

The show will be exhibited from April 17th through May 26, 2018 at the New Mexico Art League gallery, 10 am-4pm, Tuesday through Saturday.

The image featured above, Taos Country, was chosen to be in this show. It’s the same one that garnered an honorable mention in the New Mexico Magazine’s annual photo contest in 2017.

I made this triptych for my friend Charlie who lived here while he worked at what was then the Southwest Regional Office of the National Park Service in Santa Fe. He moved on to other positions in other locations but always loved this area and wished he could return. Alas, it was not to be.

The image on the left is the Rio Grande gorge as seen from the road to Taos, an iconic image. The middle is Taos Pueblo North. I am especially fond of this image because, unlike most that emphasize the towering massiveness of the Pueblo, it is put in the proper (to my mind) context of the land and sky. The image to the right was taken while camping at Wild Rivers Recreation Area near Questa, NM. Here the Rio Grande and Red Rivers converge at the bottom of an 800 foot canyon. This image is looking north, up the Rio Grande. Putting them together in one frame would, I hope, give my friend and anyone else looking at it a taste of this magnificent land.

Annual New Mexico Photographic Art Show

February 20, 2018April 17, 2018joan biordi, photographer Leave a comment

Each year hundreds of photographers submit thousands of photographs to the Annual New Mexico Photographic Art Show (ANMPAS) which showcases the finest photographic work being done in New Mexico. A jury of professionals selects only the best photography from Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque, and elsewhere in New Mexico for inclusion in the annual show.

I read that somewhere and saved it for an occasion like this. I probably would not have been so extravagantly boastful. I’ve known about ANMPAS for about 8 years now, since I began to show my work but have managed to submit entries only half those years. Traveling in the RV during the winter I either forgot or didn’t have the right images with me. When I did submit I usually got at least one entry juried into the show. This year I was determined to not let the deadline slip by and got a couple of images accepted:

YELLOWSTONE MAGIC The hot springs and pools at Yellowstone National Park provide endless variations of color and abstraction.

BUNKER HILL Not Boston’s, LA’s!

Here are images accepted in previous ANMPAS shows , 2011-2013.

Great Sand Dunes NP

The ruins of the original church of San Geronimo are reminders of that brutal deed.

Near Garfield, NM, the springtime flood irrigation of the groves promises pecans.

Bundles

Jin Mao, Shanghai

The show runs from April 1 through April 23 and the Fine Art Gallery at EXPO New Mexico will be open from 10 am to 5 pm. Opening reception is Sat., March 31st from 2-4 pm.

Joan Biordi Photo

Where you can see my images online!

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