January 15th – February 19th, 2010
Reception for Artists: Friday, January 15th, 5 to 7 p.m.
Claire Lerner was born and raised in New York, New York. She received her MFA and BFA in Fine Art Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo. After graduate school Claire moved to California where she was a member of the photography faculty at Monterey Peninsula College, Monterey, California for ten years. For the past ten years she has taught black and white and digital photography at the Santa Catalina School in Monterey, California. She has conducted many workshops on various photographic techniques and processes. She is a member of the Society of Photographic Education and the National Art Educators Association.
Claire was a recipient of the First Place Award for her work in the, Exemplary Contemporary exhibition, at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. She received the Award of Distinction from the Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA. In 2008 her work was selected for a solo exhibition at the Smith Gallery, UCSC, California. Her work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including the Monterey Museum of Art, Visa Corporation, Redwood City, CA, Cowell College, UCSC, PMI, Corporate Headquarters, Walnut Creek, CA, and the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, Monterey, CA. Claire’s work is represented in San Francisco by the Andrea Schwartz Gallery.
For the past six years Claire has been working with the notion of fragmentary experience and the meaning that may or may not result form the arbitrary and the accidental. She overhears bits of conversation at various locations and carefully records these bits sequentially into a journal. Claire makes photographs at the same location as a record of her visual experience. She places conversations and visual imagery together in categories of information such as sky, ground and conversation. Her goal is to yield an aggregate aesthetic meaning and relationship of words and vision where none existed before. The subject of water and its relationship to the human condition has been a recurrent theme in her work as she seeks to explore water as a metaphor for the subconscious mind and the human condition.
The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts is open Monday
Through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., or by appointment |
