From Concept to Installation: Cynthia Farnell on "Presence (Jamestown)”

Wednesday, July 21

7:30 - 8:30 pm

Artists’ Statement (from the 2020 Outdoor Arts Experience)

Cynthia Farnell uses lens-based media, printmaking, and drawing to observe and respond to the world. Many of her projects are transferred or printed onto paper, panel or fabric. These two-dimensional works are used as elements of exhibitions within or responding to specific architectural spaces. Her body of work, Presence, is a series of installations in historically significant buildings that draw on locally sourced archival material to celebrate community. Presence (Jamestown) is her fourth project in this ongoing series. In collaboration with the Jamestown Historical Society, Farnell has selected photographs, documents, and artifacts from the town archive. Coupled with her own photographs and using a methodology of digitally manipulated montage, this imagery is the basis for a series of fabric banners installed alongside the eastern facade of the Jamestown Museum. Farnell draws on past functions of the building as a one-room schoolhouse, and later as the town library as inspiration for the installation.

In the process of selecting the photographs and creating the montages, an impression emerged of Jamestown as a restorative, spiritual, and abundant place. To emphasize this concept, Farnell decided to use the format of a summer day, from sunrise to sunset, and several of the activities to be pursued  - sailing at the mouth of the bay, courting your sweetheart amongst the wildflowers, surfcasting at Beavertail, walking in a farm meadow. These scenes are tethered to the grounds of Jamestown Museum, a building at the village crossroads that was once a one-room schoolhouse and then, the town library.  Today the Museum continues to be a place of curiosity, memory, and intellectual sustenance .

Cynthia Farnell’s work is exhibited internationally and is in the collections of The International Center of Photography, The Jule Collins Smith Museum, and Davidson College, among others. Farnell, also a university curator, has travelled extensively in Europe where she has led courses on Contemporary Art. She earned her M.A. in Art History from Georgia State University, M.F.A. in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, her B.F.A. from Auburn University and a Certificate of the General Studies of Photography from the International Center of Photography. After receiving her MFA from RISD, Farnell lived in Rhode Island, where she was awakened to its natural beauty and complex history. She returns each summer to be recharged.

cynthiafarnell.com