Allison Plass: The Salon Jane Award for Women in Photography

Allison Plass: The Salon Jane Award for Women in Photography by Aline SmithsonNovember 30, 2024

Allison Plass, Taking Flight

The Center of Photographic Art recently opened their annual CPA International Juried Exhibition, jurored by the indefatigable Elizabeth Avedon. The exhibition is in the gallery and online and runs through Sunday, December 29, 2024.

As part of the awards offered, a new award has been created by Salon Jane. Elizabeth Avedon was asked to choose a female artist to receive this honor and she selected Allison Plass for her series, Boys in the Garden. Avedon states,”I’ve been drawn to Allison Plass’ photographs. The subjects in her pictures are very personal, exploring the beauty and fragility of intimate connections within the family. They give off both strength and vulnerability and an underlying sensuality at times. I find her work is always uniquely her own. I have always liked Allison’s description of her work in this quote: “Feminine and masculine, energies and archetypes, swirling around and inside. Looking for the overlap, the androgyny, the wholeness.” – Allison Plass

Salon Jane members are honored to congratulate Allison Plass as the inaugural awardee of the Salon Jane Award. Their hope is that this award will amplify Allison’s artistic voice and allow her photographic work to be seen by an ever-expanding audience. There is an online artist’s talk with Plass on November 30, 2024.

Salon Jane is thrilled to announce a new award at the Center for Photographic Art. This award will be given to a female artist, with the intention of encouraging women artists to create and to promote more women in the arts. Beginning in 2024, any woman who has been selected for the annual CPA International Juried Exhibition, either the main gallery or web gallery, is eligible. The juror will choose the winning image and award the $1000 prize. This prize will be announced at the opening of the Exhibition. Salon Jane is a six-member artist collective formed in Monterey, California, in 2014. Over the past 10 years, the members of Salon Jane have created a safe environment for artistic risk-taking, inspiration and creative evolution. The group exhibits their photographic work at galleries and museums. Salon Jane members are Martha Casanave, Susan Hyde Greene, Jane Olin, Anna Rheim, Robin V. Robinson, and Robin Ward.

©Allison Plass, Hybrids

Boys in the Garden

In my ongoing series, Boys in the Garden, I situate my husband and two teenage sons within imaginary frames of possibility. What does it feel like for those who identify as boys and men to have only been given one story? In the space of the garden, old ideas of patriarchy give way to more generative forces, which complicate notions of gender and identity, individualism and connectedness. Scenes of transformation, fragility, and impermanence in the natural world come to mirror their own stages in life as they negotiate youth and middle age in a shifting cultural landscape. Inspired by art history, fairytale, and myth, I ask them to enact a kind of mock theater, reimagining cultural mythologies of the past and exploring their own stories as they emerge. I come to see this journey as my own, a hybrid recognition of what it means to be human.

©Allison Plass, Dance Party

Allison Plass is a Fine Art photographer living in NYC. She received her MA in Art History at UC Santa Barbara where she explored issues of gender and representation in European Art. She completed the Advanced Track Program at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2020. Her photographic practice is influenced by art history, the natural world, and the intersection of cultural myths and stories we carry about our own lives. She has received numerous awards and has been featured in solo, group, and juried exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Asia. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, as the 2023 First Prize winner in the KLPA Portrait Awards, and she is a 2023 LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist.

Instagram: @aplass