Join us for a discussion with the artists currently on view in our Atelier and Griffin galleries! Cody Bratt will discuss his project, The Other Stories, and David Johnson and Philip Matthews will talk about their collaboration, Wig Heavier than a Boot. Both of these exhibitions are on view in Winchester until December 10, 2023.
This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non-Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers here.
©Cody Bratt
©David Johnson
About Cody Bratt
Cody Bratt (b. 1982) is a San Francisco-born and based artist. His father, a photoengraver, and his mother, a multimedia artist, inspired his love of photography and book making, in particular. He holds a BA in Rhetoric with a formal concentration in Narrative and Image from the University of California, Berkeley (2005). Shying away from a literal approach, Cody's photography employs primarily non-linear emotional or psychological approaches to exploring subjects and concepts. Unreliable memories, displacement, loss and coming of age feature centrally in Cody's work. He has exhibited internationally at Athens Photo Festival, Berlin Art Week, Month of Photography Los Angeles, Griffin Museum of Photography, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, ICP Museum, Brighton Photo Fringe, Filter Photo Festival amongst others. Cody is a 2016 LensCulture Emerging 50 Talent, 2018 PDN 30 nominee and 2019 Review Santa Fe attendee. His most recent series, THE OTHER STORIES, was honored with a 2020 CENTER Awards Director's Choice Award and a 2020 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction. Cody's first monograph, LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND, debuted by Fraction Editions in 2018. That series was awarded a 2018 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction, named as a finalist for the 2016 Duke University CDS/Honickman First Book Prize and had images selected and published as winners in American Photography 34 (2018). His work is in public and private collections in several states across the US, as well as Europe. Cody's work has been published worldwide in print and online venues including PDN, LENSCRATCH, LensCulture, Lomography Magazine, iGNANT, Gente Di Fotografia, Blur Magazine, Aint-Bad, and Float Magazine amongst others.
About David Johnson
David Johnsonis an artist, educator, and curator based in Conway, SC. He received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007 and earned his BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography from Texas Christian University. In 2011, David was awarded the Great Rivers Visual Arts Award from the Gateway Foundation. This biennial award culminated with his 2012 exhibition institutional etiquette and strange overtones at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis. Wig Heavier Than a Boot, a collaborative project with poet Philip Matthews, was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2019 and was featured at the Fotofest Biennial 2020 in Houston. The University of Texas Press published Johnson's second bookIt Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festivalin March of 2021. Art Museum Saint Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, National Building Museum in Washington D.C. and Rathaus in Stuttgart, Germany. His work can be found in the collection at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Don't Take Pictures, the Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, Photo-emphasis and Fraction Magazine have featured his work online. David has curated exhibitions for Center of Creative Arts, Paul Artspace and the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in St Louis. Currently, Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Coastal Carolina University.
About Philip Matthews
Philip Matthewsis a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch (Alice James Books, 2020) and Wig Heavier Than A Boot (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with photographer David Johnson. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice of the past decade has investigated spiritual, queer power, questions of home and ecological shift. He is curious about what happens next.Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust and Hemera Foundation. He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16 he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration and community-directed action. In two 6-month phases over the past three years, he returned to North Carolina to de-hoard his grandmother's home and repair the physical and energetic infrastructures of a shared family place. This collaborative work with his mother has laid ground for new writing to take root. He currently directs programs at Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit in Sauk County, Wisconsin dedicated to integrating culture and agriculture across the rural-urban continuum. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.