Laura Hart Newlon
Laura Hart Newlon is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose recent work explores digital materiality and conditions of visibility related to the body and image-making. Newlon has recently exhibited work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the SOIL and Specialist galleries in Seattle, Triumph, ADDS DONNA, LVL3, and the Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center in Chicago, as well as the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Baltimore Art Fair. Her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, and the Photographic Center Northwest. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington (2010). Newlon lives in Seattle where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Cornish College of the Arts.
Heavy Focus
Total running time – 11:47
Heavy Focus weaves together ideas of tactility, visibility and the body, and the material conditions of image-making. In this single-channel video, disembodied hands carefully collage and layer physical photographic prints, while other images are manipulated within a digital workspace. Drawing from a wide variety of idiosyncratic sources including architectural theory, vintage beauty tutorials, phenomenology, archaeological studies of Venus figurines, stock images and the artist’s own photographic archives, Heavy Focus explores seeing as a sensory act that plays out both tenderly and forcefully upon the body.
