By Jill Evans Petzall and Spectators
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
This innovative display uses digital art that invites community interaction to explore the complex relationships we have with our cameras and our self-images. Cutting across commonplace assumptions, the interactive series shows how images cannot do without, but instead must require and inspire, stories about what’s visible and invisible.
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and artist Jill Evans Petzall questions what it means to take a photograph, as she explores the fickleness of meaning within travel photography. This multi-layered work shows us that the photographic image creates a world of its own – and has the power to mediate our relationships to the world around us. Blending documentary style with poetic imagery, the exhibit offers photographs that Petzall shot over three years while in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and Singapore.
Each story that viewers tell about a photograph lets us all see the world through someone else’s eyes.
About The Artist
Jill Evans PetzallJill Evans Petzall makes films, media art, writes poetry, & teaches about social justice from a female perspective. She is the winner of 4 Emmy awards, among other honors including the Distinguished Alumna Award from Washington University’s School of Arts and Sciences, and a Maya Angelou Award for Media Literacy. Jill’s works have been on broadcast and cable television, shown in art galleries and film festivals, and used in state legislatures and non-profit agencies as advocacy tools to promote the rights of women around the world.
Jill’s work as a filmmaker has focused on the arts and on multiple issues concerning social justice. She has made documentaries on such wide-ranging topics as Maestro Leonard Slatkin, formerly of the St. Louis Symphony, poet T. S. Eliot, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. Orphan Trains of the mid-19th century, the prevention of spouse abuse and the sexual abuse of children, promoting family literacy, immigration rights, and the rights of children with mothers in prison. Her multi-media, interactive installation “Still Lives with Stories,” will be featured at The Sheldon Galleries in 2017.