PhotoNOLA: Meg Griffiths: Somewhere Within and Without

PhotoNOLA: Meg Griffiths: Somewhere Within and Without by Aline SmithsonFebruary 19, 2019

©Meg Griffiths, Magnet of an Invisible Circle, 2017

Getting to spend time with Meg Griffiths is always a treat and to have that time at PhotoNOLA focused on her new project, Somewhere Within and Without, was truly special. The work is unlike her other narrative projects about Cuba or the South or the West–the photographs are internal, conceptual, and personal. Created during an artist residency, the time and quiet allowed Meg to contemplate her life and place in it. Working with conceptual still lifes, where light and ephemera shimmer into new incarnations, she reveals that there is a beauty in the transitory nature of life, in those liminal spaces between the spectrum of emotions and events that come with being human.

Somewhere Within and Without received the Second Place nod in the 2018 PhotoNOLA Review Award. Meg will receive a Santa Fe Photo Workshops gift certificate. Some of this work was featured in a previous post where artist Cig Harvey and Meg interview each other for our series, Photographers on Photographers.

2_Meg Griffiths_Cloud of an endleass self_2018

©Meg Griffiths, Cloud of an Endless Self, 2018

Meg Griffiths is a Texas based artist. Her photographic research currently deals with the domestic, personal historical identity and cultural relationships. Her work has been shown internationally, including: PhotoZurich Germany, Barcelona Biennial for Fine Art and Documentary Photography, Pingyao International Festival of Photography, Chaing Mai Photo Festival, at venues within the United States such as Columbia Museum of Art, Center for Fine Art Photography, Museum of Living Artists in San Diego, Griffin Museum in Boston, Houston Center for Photography, Candela Gallery in Richmond.

She was recently published on the cover of Oxford American and Focal Plane Journal. Her work has also been shared in the Boston Globe, Photo District News, Fisheye (FR). Her work is a part of many private collections as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Middle Tennessee University, and the Capitol One Collection.

Her first monograph Casa de fruta y pan was published in 2015 with Aint Bad. In 2018 she recently published two collaborative projects: Nothing that Falls Away with fellow photographer Eliot Dudik through Zatara Press, “And light followed the flight of sound” with One Day Projects. By virtue of recognition, many of these books have been collected by institutions across the country such as MOMA, Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Duke Archive of Documentary Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.

Meg was recently honored in 2019 to receive 2nd Place Prize at PhotoNOLA, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Best Fine Art Series in 2017, selected as on of Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s One’s to watch in 2016, 2nd Place Prize at PhotoNOLA in 2015, and named one of PDN 30’s: New and Emerging Photographers in 2012.

She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is the Area Head and an Assistant Professor of Photography at Texas Woman’s University.

©Meg Griffiths, Sieve of the Universe, 2017

Somewhere Within and Without

Somewhere within and without, attempts to subtly shift and deconstruct the ways in which we engage with space, time and perception—being and not being. It draws upon personal historical identity to raise questions about the self before and after a traumatic event such as a birth of a child or the death of a loved one. There is a strangeness in this liminal place. Waking each morning, to the familiar, coming into who you are now versus who you were before—feeling only an echo of the former self. These images are distillations of these senses and experiences. Using everyday household objects as a point of departure from what we think we know, the work offers a surface to meditate and contemplate these discordant and poignant transitions. – Meg Griffiths