The Daily Tar Heel
Printing news. Raising hell. Since 1893.
Thursday, March 28, 2024 Newsletters Latest print issue

We keep you informed.

Help us keep going. Donate Today.
The Daily Tar Heel

Alumni art displayed in historic Horace Williams House

10-27 - Experimental Photography Exhibit - Jenny Burton and Greg Halloran have their art exhibited at The Horace Williams House on October 27th. The two UNC alumni won a competition to have their work exhibited while in photography classes.
10-27 - Experimental Photography Exhibit - Jenny Burton and Greg Halloran have their art exhibited at The Horace Williams House on October 27th. The two UNC alumni won a competition to have their work exhibited while in photography classes.

From now until Nov. 24, the Horace Williams House will be displaying the unique photograms and experimental photography of recent UNC graduates Jenny Burton and Greg Halloran.

Halloran’s work captures the movement of water in black and white ripples. Burton’s work uses soft and saturated colors to suggest vibrations and ambiguous objects.

Tama Hochbaum, art committee co-chairwoman of Preservation Chapel Hill, said the work of both artists is more radical than work from past exhibits shown at the Horace Williams House.

“It’s a fascinating thing that the exhibit is in a historical home but the images are absolutely new and they blend very well,” Hochbaum said.

Hochbaum also said Burton and Halloran are the first recent alumni to be featured in the house. She said the preservation society, which selects the artists to be exhibited in the house, is beginning to establish a relationship with the University’s art department.

When Burton and Halloran were in elin o’Hara slavick’s conceptual photography class, Hochbaum, a friend of slavick’s, invited the class to her home to view her own work.

“So there was this wonderful situation where these two were at my house, and I was in fact, at that moment, making a flier to ask for applications to the program,” Hochbaum said. “So I encouraged them all to apply.”

Burton and Halloran decided to send in their work as one submission on slavick’s suggestion, and the committee immediately liked their work, Hochbaum said.

“(Their work) is powerful and beautiful and very painterly,” Hochbaum said. “The artists seem beyond their age, they seem advanced, like someone who is in their 30s or 40s. The images are wise, almost.”

Burton and Halloran both began their work for the exhibit in the photography class, where both artists tested the boundaries of darkroom photography and photograms. Traditionally, photograms are made without a camera by placing objects on light-sensitive paper and exposing the paper to varying intensities of light. This will create silhouettes and outlines of the objects placed on the paper.

Burton said she wouldn’t have pushed herself so far in making her photograms if she had not had slavick.

“Doing the first project, I was happy with it, and she encouraged me to keep going in experimenting with new things and kind of doing my own thing, whereas in most classes it’s kind of like you are trying to do something to please a professor,” Burton said. “But she gave us the freedom to do what pleased us, and then the result of that pleased her.”

Halloran said the exhibition is a clash of different moods because of his and Burton’s different approaches to creating photograms.

“I was focusing on creating some chaos, and that’s why I layered so many things on top of each other,” Halloran said. “And then I look at Jenny’s pieces and I think of them as color harmonies, and it calms me down a whole, whole bunch.”

Burton said people will be able to see something new in their photograms if they come to the exhibit.

“There’s something here that you haven’t seen before,” Burton said.

“And I think that’s the key.”

arts@dailytarheel.com

To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.