Tri-County Arts Council to Host Opening Reception for “Through the Looking Glass” and “Edwardian Olean”
Tri-County Arts Council to Host Opening Reception for
“Through the Looking Glass” and “Edwardian Olean”
OLEAN, NY - The Tri-County Arts Council is delighted to exhibit the extraordinary digital art of Laura Cole in two exhibits: “Through the Looking Glass” and “Edwardian Olean,” beginning with an opening reception and artist talk from 6:00-8:00pm on Friday, February 12th. The exhibit will continue through Saturday, April 3rd in the Arts Council Gallery, 110 W. State Street, Olean. The Arts Council is open from 2:00-6:00pm Tuesday through Friday, and from noon-5:00pm Saturdays. Admission to the opening reception is free, only requiring reservations to observe Covid safety protocol. Reservations can be made on the sign-up link at https://signup.com/go/iXWLmHU
Laura Cole’s digital art is a masterful restoration of time-worn photography from a long ago era into fresh colorful portraits which transcend time and distance, linking the viewer with Olean’s forgotten Edwardian age.
The thread connecting all of Cole’s art is “the notion that objects from the past have the power to move us, emotionally, through time and space, to by-gone eras and otherworldly places,” she writes on her website: www.lauracolephoto.com. Her avant-garde surrealist art style reveals a dreamlike, or as she describes, a “fairytale-like” quality to create her “Through the Looking Glass” series.
“This resurrection of forgotten faces, exposed on old tintype photographs, starts when I scan these analog, 19th Century artifacts into my digital workspace,” she said, adding she uses Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter “to manipulate the unaware models into colorized-characters in surreal collages that transport the viewer to a place and time of maximalism and fairytale-like whimsy.”
Cole combines scans of 19th century photographs with photos taken from different objects to create surreal collages. Using Corel Painter she digitally hand-paints over the entire image at the end of her process to create the "painterly" look to them.
“My images usually have rich colors and an element of nonsense or whimsy. My goal is for each image to feel like a scene from a fairytale,” Cole said. “I choose to work with images of real people from the 1800's because I'm fascinated with the time period and have a strange nostalgia for what is, no doubt, an idealized notion of what it was like to live in a simpler, more elegant time.”
Cole explained that her art career began in 2012 with a series of self-portraits she created as she learned to use her first-ever camera and Photoshop. “I began shooting weddings and portraits professionally the following year but continued to create fine-art self-portraits in my free time. I eventually came across a number of artists who were creating various forms of collage using antique photographs, and I was fascinated!” she said. “I would lose myself for hours just scrolling through an eBay search of "tintypes" and admiring the unique faces, beautiful clothing, unusual posing, and all other aspects of these tiny remnants of history and of people's lives. As I stepped aside, they seemed to take over as the subjects of my portraits.”
The “Edwardian Olean” series is a bit different. Cole begins with old tintype, ambrotype, or daguerreotype portraits. In this series, she used old postcards, post-marked in Olean between 1901-1914.
“I curbed the surrealism a bit because I wanted them to feel like miniature time machines that could take the viewer back to an Olean that no longer exists ... one of pride, wealth, and abundance,” she said, warmly recalling the Olean in which she was born and has lived her entire life. “My family goes back generations in Olean, on both sides. It was important to me to create something that paid homage to the important role that Olean has played in me becoming the person that I am.”
More information about Laura Cole’s art and her upcoming exhibits can be found on the Art Council’s website at www.myartscouncil.net
