In the Room

Center for Photography at Woodstock Opens New Exhibition In the Room Features Works by Three Contemporary Photographers

Kingston, NY, May 16, 2023–The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is delighted to announce the opening of In the Room, a group exhibition featuring three contemporary photographers: Kelly Kristin Jones, Jonathan Mark Jackson (2021 CPW artist-in-residence), and Ashley M. Freeby. Through their work in still photography, archival research, and family histories, these three artists explore the relationships between personal and collective memories, and in particular how public histories are made, challenged, and remade. Organized by Kingston-based writer and curator Frances Cathryn, the exhibition opens at CPW, 474 Broadway, Kingston, on Saturday, June 10, 2023, from 5-7pm.

In the Room focuses on works that exploit the medium of photography to challenge the ways we document and remember. Through the critical interventions by Jones, Jackson, and Freeby, we can better understand how photographs function as social objects that perpetuate the power held by the people who made them. “By creating a fuller narrative of our shared past, these artists offer us ways to counter histories that silence Black Americans and obscure violence against them,” Cathryn notes. “With a more complete understanding of U.S. history, we are better equipped to work toward an equitable present.”

In her series “Many Thousands Gone,” multimedia artist Ashley M. Freeby uses online news photographs of sites where a person of color was murdered by the state. But she has altered these found photographs by digitally erasing any evidence of brutality, such as blood, bullet casings, or caution tape. Chicago artist Kelly Kristin Jones looks at the ways in which history is memorialized by creating a vast archive of over 500 found snapshots and other vernacular photographs, each showing white women posing with monuments. She has organized these typological images around a series of different archetypes, culminating in a site-specific wall covering in the CPW gallery. When Jonathan Mark Jackson learned that his fifth great-grandfather had published The House Servant’s Directory in 1827, he spent the next several years visiting historic house museums to try to understand that lifetime of servitude. Jackson’s various self-portraits in those spaces serve as an interpretation of his ancestor’s professional role, and as a way of reclaiming the Black subject in the historical record. A work from Jackson’s most recent series, shown for the first time at CPW, explores a potential history represented by the portrait of a lone Black singer; his aim is to repair historical omissions, to hear, quite literally, from those who have been silenced in its production. Listen here to the audio Jackson created to go alongside this work.

“In the Room is an important example of how media, history, and society ‘forget’ critical events and caste structures, enabling a version of the past that whitewashes violence toward the most vulnerable among us,” says CPW Executive Director Brian Wallis.

About the curator
Frances Cathryn combines archival research, media theory, and social design to recontextualize American cultural narratives. In 2021–22, she was part of New Inc. at the New Museum, working in the Future Memory track to develop an online archival project that challenges Western intellectual traditions in cultural institutions. She currently manages editorial projects at Forge Project, a Native-led arts initiative working to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism.

About the Center for Photography at Woodstock
Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is a not-for-profit arts organization with a two-fold mission: to support artists working in photography and related media; and to engage audiences through creation, discovery, and learning. At the heart of CPW’s mission is programming that is community-based, artist-centered, and collaborative. To foster public conversation around critical issues in photography, CPW provides exhibitions, workshops, artists’ residencies, and access to a digital media lab. In 2022, CPW relocated from Woodstock to 474 Broadway in Kingston.

Press images and interview requests
To request high resolution images for press reproduction and interviews, please contact CPW by clicking here.

Top Image: Jonathan Mark Jackson, Stamp, 2019