REVIEWS:

ARTnews, Q&A with Photofairs Founder Scott Gray, by Karen K. Ho

White Hot Magazine, Photofairs 2023 Triumphantly Debuts in New York, by J. Scott Orr

What Will You Remember?, Inspiration at Photofairs New York!, by Elin Spring

Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Art Fair the Armory Show: This is how history is continued in New York, by Frauke Steffens

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And reverie.
The reverie alone will do,
If bees are few.

                        Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is a time-honored darling of American poetry, famous for her unconventional verse punctuated by dashes and spaces. Though she made no secret of her poetry, only a handful of poems were published in her lifetime - she was better known for her green thumb.

This Earthen Door is a photographic re-working of her herbarium, started when she was 14 years old. Herbariums were popular in Dickinson’s era, a flower scrapbook made by pressing dried plants into the book’s pages. In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s effort made nearly 200 years ago (1840s), and galvanized by the fact that her herbarium is now too delicate for public or even private viewing, we gathered plants and flowers from our mutual gardens in Quebec and North Carolina to remake her sampler with an early plant-based photographic process known as an Anthotype.

This Earthen Door encompasses more than three years of making, beginning in the Pandemic, where we sequestered away like Dickinson at her writing desk, and is tied to the cycle of seasons and gardens as we harvested plants in their prime. Like the time machine that is any herbarium, with its pressed specimens offering a slice of the past, This Earthen Door gives a glimpse into the nature-inspired world of the enigmatic, beloved poet nearly two centuries later - and asks, with today’s “plant blindness” and climate chaos, where she may point us.