“Vanishing Point,” the second Bellarmine Photography Invitational exhibit featuring work by Stephen Chalmers, Letitia Quesenberry, Geoffrey Carr and Eric Sung, begins this coming Friday, October 14. Louisville native Chalmers will discuss his series “Dump Sites,” images of locations in the American West where serial killers have disposed of the bodies of their victims.
The exhibit runs through November 6.
Although the four photographers represented explore differing methods and themes, their work captures the transformation from the concrete to the ephemeral. Chalmers’ photos are especially striking given what he calls the “psychic weight” of the situations represented: “Taken months or years after the event and the associated media coverage, one is immediately struck by the absence of spectacle and the beauty of the sites,” he says of the otherwise ordinary, everyday places turned into horrific resting places. “The images offer a spectral, haunted kind of evidence of the sites’ historical uses, and they rely explicitly on a spiritual ‘experience of the place’ to commemorate the destruction of a life and the memory of the victim.” Chalmers’ photography has been exhibited throughout the world and is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Light Work, Polaroid and the Getty Research Institute.
The free, public exhibit opens at 5:30 with a lecture by Chalmers, and the reception will continue until 8:00 p.m.; both events will take place at the McGrath Gallery, located on Bellarmine Boulevard off Norris Place, near the intersection of Norris Place and Princeton Drive. The gallery is open from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily.
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Photo: Courtesy Stephen Chalmers
