Forces at Work

Moving from the domestic space into the suburban backyard to the social and cultural spaces of institutions and the landscape, the three artists in Forces at Work attempt through photography to see what is invisible. Each artist in her own way examines the timely and often futile desire to connect with the natural world.

In Lily Brooks’ series We Have to Count the Clouds, photographs function as evidence of the different ways in which we understand, negotiate, and mediate the air that surrounds us. Meteorological instruments act as an extension of our senses in the guise of control and within them a semblance of understanding exists.

Christine Collins began The Keepers after a suburban community’s bee colony collapsed from the cold of a New England winter. She became interested in this contemporary suburban desire to connect with nature. But she also discovered that, ultimately, the evolution of a beehive—and the colony to which it belongs—is left largely out of the keepers’ control.

Kate Greene’s series Anomalous Phenomena is a window into the anxiety of the domestic. Her meticulously constructed photographs of poisonous houseplants that have been disturbed or disrupted recall the trappings of our own psychology, illuminating the space between what we see and what we know.

Bios

Lily Brooks is a photographer living and working in Austin, Texas. She earned her MFA in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin in 2014 and graduated with Departmental Honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006. At UT, Brooks was the 2013 recipient of a Powers Graduate Continuing Research Fellowship and the Learning Tuscany Teaching Scholar in 2013. Recently, her work was exhibited at Co-Lab Projects and Trinity University, and she has been a guest lecturer at Texas State University and MassArt.

Christine Collins lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is on the faculty and teaches Photography and Art History at Lesley University College of Art and Design. Collins received a BA in English from Skidmore College and a MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has been a guest lecturer and critic at Harvard University, Parsons the New School for Design, and Emerson College among others. Collins has exhibited her work widely throughout the nation, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Town and Country Magazine, Esquire Magazine (Russia), Adbusters Magazine. She was a Critical Mass Finalist in 2011 and nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet in 2013. Her work is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery, New York.

Kate Greene lives and works in Portland, Maine. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 and her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2008. Greene was awarded a Tierney Fellowship in 2010 and her work was included in the exhibition Looking at the Land – 21st Century American Views at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 2012, as well as exhibited at Daniel Cooley Gallery in New York and Bodega Gallery, Philadelphia. She is currently a Lecturer in Photography at Yale University School of Art.