Resurrection and Wright

Lady Holding a Hat © Willie Anne Wright
Brugmansia blossoms face the ground rather than the sky, a commotion of silent bells. Shamans in South America use them to speak with the dead. In her own way, fine art photographer, Willie Anne Wright, does, too. Like any good conjuror, she's always open to new talismans. A few years ago, a friend gave her a potted Brugmansia.
In the series spawned by the flower, she went back to the beginnings of photography and created photograms. Placing cut blossoms and the images she wants to call home in full sun, she waits. The silent brugs trumpet. And soon enough, the phantoms come.

Profile of a Lady © Willie Anne Wright

Spirits Come Home: The Civil War (Redux) Images of Willie Anne Wright

Second Manassas: Women and Parasols
© 2011 WILLIE ANNE WRIGHT

The ghosts of the Civil War are always present in the South — stand in the shade of the stone rifleman in any southern square, and they crowd up close, hoping you'll wonder their names.

Native Virginian and VCU alumna, Willie Anne Wright, does more than that: she catches them on film. For 13 years, armed with pinhole cameras of her own design, Wright followed Civil War re-enactors to many of the most famous battlefields from Manassas to Gettysburg. The result, Civil War Redux , has been on the march both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In 2011, selections from the series were shown in group shows at the George Eastman House in Rochester and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. Solo show venues were the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia and the VMFA in Richmond, which will travel the show statewide through 2013.

A Hole in Time: German Exhibition of American Masters

The Ruins of Menokin, by veteran pinhole photographer and VCU alumna, Willie Anne Wright.

Ever Present Past, which ended much too soon at The Neue Sächsische Gallerie in Chemnitz, ought to come with a word or two of warning. If it doesn't already, Time — captured, lost, mournful, unyielding — will certainly haunt you once you've seen this show.

So be careful when you enter the transcendent rubble of Willie Anne Wright's abandoned houses or fall up into the eternity of Ed Levinson's skies. Watch your back as you move across Craig Barber's lightstruck paddies: ghosts of the past hover. Time makes its insistent call to look back, look beyond, look inside.

At the very least, be prepared to find heartache in the rich shadows of dreamscapes, battlegrounds and interiors from Tokyo to Manassas and Havana to Viet Nam. But don't despair: amid the ghosts and grief caught by these three veterans of the pinhole camera, there also shines a healing light.

Ever Present Past
-curator, Marko Hehl
www.neue-saechsische-galerie.de