Chatham Hill Winery is pleased to announce that a local artist, Ellen Giamportone , will exhibit her unique photographs in the Tasting Room Art Gallery during the months of July and August.

Please stop by to view Ellen’s exhibit anytime during Chatham Hill Winery’s open hours.  All items are for sale and marked as such.

We hope you will join us during this exhibit.

Ellen Giamportone  - Artist's Statement

Since 1974 I have been using a camera to look at the world of people, places, objects and ideas. Concealment is a theme that I often explore in my photography.

For the last 4 years I’ve been shooting a series entitled “Lifting the Veil of Night.” Nighttime settings offer tableaux, which spark the unconscious human desire for deeper connections unavailable by the light of the sun. In the same way, masks, like darkness, conceal the familiar allowing for power and mystery to be revealed.

Masks provide a concealment of the familiar allowing a transformation to occur within the wearer. A simple mask, even just covering a part of the face, can access this transformation through body language into the character, animal or spirit the mask portrays.

Masks are used almost universally for their expressive power. They can blur the line between reality and fiction, providing a disconnection from the rational mind allowing more creative fluid associations to form and flow.

The function of masks may be magical or religious; they may appear in rites of passage or as a make-up for a form of theatre. The wearer and viewer are able to have the shared experience of seeing and feeling this embodiment.

My photographs investigate night and darkness as mines for psychological and poetic excavation. Our present culture has turned our view of the dark into a phobia. We tend to walk quickly at night because being out in the darkness is something we instinctively avoid.

Nighttime exploration and adventure is also less appealing not only due to fear, but also because our habits as a society are increasingly linked to technology. It is my belief that nighttime settings offer tableaux, which spark the unconscious human desire for deeper connections unavailable by the light of the sun.

The night exists as part of life, part of the 24 hour cycle of a day. Night conceals the details of color and form, revealing only portions in pockets of light. Just as the “light” of day can be used as a spiritual metaphor for consciousness, “darkness” is that place within us that represents the unconscious.

By exploring concealment, I strive to offer images as portals of entry into realms where we resonate at our core; where we might find a touchstone of some sort of truth, a form of beauty and a sense of mystery.